Hi all,
I'm now working on a full new version of WikiHiero, the extension used
to display hieroglyphic text on MediaWiki.
The actual version of WikiHiero (active on Wikipedia projects) generates
HTML code and use a pre-generated picture for each hieroglyph. The bad
thing is the hieroglyph positioning into a quadrat (a square that can
contain from 1 to many hieroglyphs) is done by HTML tables that make it
unusable inline with text. As the possibility to use hieroglyphs inline
with text is the main request from Wikipedia users (who use horrible
hacks to simulate it!), I'm considering the available solutions:
1) Use pictures + CSS
Like actually, we can generate HTML that use pre-generated pictures but
do all positioning using CSS.
The god:
- Cleaner
The bad:
- Some complex quadrat positioning seems impossible to do without using
relative positioning.
2) Generate a picture
Like <math> tag, we can generate on the fly one picture for all the text
into the <hiero> tag (original hieroglyph information are in SVG format).
The god:
- Easy to inline;
- Allow complex rendering (like hieroglyph orientation inversion, etc.).
The bad:
- Server resource consumption if we do it on the fly or hard-disk
consumption if we cache generated files.
Can you please give me your advices?
Aoineko / Guillaume
PS: Additional question: There is any good reason to keep compatibility
to PHP4 or can I forget it for version 5?