[lojban-beginners] Re: Firefox Add-on: Lojban Popup Dictionary

[Charles Duffy <cduffy@spamcop.net>]

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).