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?