Novelang-0.27.0 released!

Latest release available here.

Novelang-0.27.0 enhances the tag feature with standard HTML stylesheet displaying the list of user-defined tags. In a source document, tags are words preceded by an arrobas @. Levels, paragraphs, paragraphs inside angled bracket pairs (aka blockquotes) and cell rows (aka tables) may be tagged.

  @javascript @performance
By now this feature all relies on Javascript 
running inside the Web browser.  

HTML generated using default stylesheet renders tags like this, with a nice color set making tags distinguishable at a glance:

It is now possible to hide all the text which is not tagged, selecting tags in a list which appear on topright corner of HTML document, with a fixed position that keeps it always visible and a disclosure box which hides the list by default:

If a level or a set of paragraphs inside angled bracket pairs do have at least one of requested tags, it is displayed with all of its content. If a paragraph has at least one of requested tags, it is displayed, as all its parents (levels or set of paragraphs).

By now this feature all relies on Javascript running inside the Web browser. This doesn’t scale on big documents (with lots of paragraphs and levels). For some big document with HTML generation taking about 13 s, selecting one tag takes more than 70 s and triggers several “slow script” warnings.

A more suitable approach would be to trim the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) server-side. This requires passing parameters to the query. Because of pre-rendering processing, tag-based filtering would work for any other other format than HTML for free.

There would be less to do in Javascript; it would just update the tag list in order to reflect document’s state.