Sunday, January 9, 2011

Husserl Encyclopedia Britannica article (1927) in German

There are now two versions of Edmund Husserl's 1927 Encyclopedia Britannica article over at phil.aule-browser such that both require the Curl plugin for the browser but one uses a layout for a student of German.

This is accomplished while using the same text as input to both pages.

Each page is formatted as a single {article } which includes several texts each wrapped as a {para } within that one article, e.g.,

  {article
     {para [Husserl paragraphs]  }
     {para [further Husserl paragraphs]  }
     [ etc ]
  }

What is different between the two pages is how {para } is declared.  In the one case it is a simple
{paragraph } and in the other it is

   {paragraph text-preserve-whitespace? = true }

The reason this makes such a difference in the presentation of the text is that each sentence is ended with {ln }

{ln } is a text format defined by me to do nothing in the one view, but to separate sentences in the other view.

The result is presented using inverse indentation as in:

This is a difficult sentence in German by Husserl
   which uses jargon or unusual terminology
   or has convoluted syntax or otherwise curious semantics.

This is a another difficult sentence in German
   which also uses more jargon 
   or which also has convoluted syntax or otherwise curious semantics.

In a site-specific browser for philosophy students the intent would be to offer translation options and annotations.

The source text itself remains very readable in its own right due to the minimal markup in that shared source text (which is loaded into each page with an {include "name-of-text-file.scurl" } procedure.)

Neither page permits text selection by the user or source inspection of the code as a European web site claims to have a copyright on this text.

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