From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Jul 29 07:16:02 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:16:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IF9Yt-0008Bu-HZ for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:16:01 -0700 Received: from smtp1.isgenesis.com ([168.215.170.6] helo=isgenesis.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IF9Yo-0008Bk-Kq for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:15:58 -0700 Received: from [168.215.170.1] (account ccd HELO [10.222.0.214]) by isgenesis.com (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.1.5) with ESMTPSA id 2866980 for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sun, 29 Jul 2007 09:15:52 -0500 Message-ID: <46ACA114.3080205@spamcop.net> Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2007 09:15:48 -0500 From: Charles Duffy User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 (Windows/20070716) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Firefox Add-on: Lojban Popup Dictionary References: <2f91285f0707281957s4cda109ep1666a9ea43b683a0@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <2f91285f0707281957s4cda109ep1666a9ea43b683a0@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: 1.9 X-Spam-Score-Int: 19 X-Spam-Bar: + X-archive-position: 5267 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: cduffy@spamcop.net Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners Vid Sintef wrote: > I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how exactly programs of this > kind are made or how dfficult production of them might be. At least > they seem to be not unpopuplar (there are nearly 90 add-ons listed in > the category "Language Support and Translation"). So, why not one nice > Lojban popup dictionary for Firefox? Seems reasonable. The big thing that strikes me as a concern is the parsing -- breaking out words which are strung together and selbri built fram rafsi to be able to look up the components individually. To my knowledge, the lexing and parsing tools available for lojban presently don't cover JavaScript, so there'd be some new development there (as opposed to just reusing code from a preexisting plugin). Now, to the extent that you just wanted to look up things in the gismu list (and assume that the words aren't strung together without whitespace), that's pretty near trivial. Figuring out where words separate from each other and breaking selbri down into rafsi would be a little less so. (Now, if you wanted to take a different approach and just have the client ask a server to do the translation, that would work too... and in that case, you wouldn't need to worry about writing parsers in JavaScript. Hmm).