Suttas sprinkled with empty notes on variant

[agilgur5]

@WayChuang

I suspect it has the same root cause.

That appears to be different actually, due to a test translation that HongDa added

[agilgur5]

@agilgur5

I might recommend reverting the empty string change, although I’m not sure why it was made in the first place. It is causing a variety of bugs (some of which are due to a new lack of distinction between intentional omissions and lack of localizations), makes the data a lot bigger, and causes more computational load (more keys with empty string values to process).

I did find an old thread that vaguely describes the empty string change, but the wording is too broad for me to understand the necessity of the technical rationale:

@sujato

Meanwhile, the work exposed a weakness of the current bilara-data specification, namely that we permit omitted segment IDs. This makes it harder to keep the different files in sync.

So the new requirement is that:

• All versions of the same text must have the full set of segment IDs.

Variants, notes, and references are also not the same as translations (every segment ID does not have an annotation), so I’m not sure if that rule was supposed to apply to them.

Non-sutta translations (essays, blurbs, sutta tree names, interface elements, etc) are also a different category, one where it is more likely for there to be partial/incomplete translations.

Afaict, all of the bugs from the empty string root cause are in those two categories. Perhaps a partial revert could make sense too

[agilgur5]

@cdpatton

references are not displaying when selected

@agilgur5

I can fix that one line

I’m not sure if/when the root cause will be reverted (not up to me), so I’ve made a PR for the one-line fix for this: fix: don't create anchor when reference is blank by agilgur5 · Pull Request #3743 · suttacentral/suttacentral · GitHub