It seems that the second half, like the first, is a dialog, so it’s not the case that it’s setting off an extended monologue. Is this an editorial decision in every case, or is there something about the Pali itself that suggests that parts of the sutta should be distinguished?
I mean, there are a zillion ways that idea could be expressed, but it seems like prose-versus-verse status is part of the core data. (Like, I could imagine wanting to quantify and compare how much verse each book contains versus prose.)
I am not a nerd really. What I have understood is that the explicit aim is to have the text files as plain text files, with nothing else in them. If I understood correctly, this way it allows the most flexible usage. Applications can combine languages, or use just one language, use the HTML or ignore it, or do whatever combination suits their purpose best.
Voice for example only uses the “root” and “translation” files and does not make use of the HTML. For listening, it doesn’t make a difference if something is indented or not. The less clutter on the website the better for screen reader users. Therefor it’s great that we can just ignore certain things.
Oh I hope it didn’t seem I was calling you a nerd, I was calling myself one!
These sound like good goals. My one nitpick is that the data about whether a particular line is verse or prose seems to be stored only in the HTML. That means an application that wants to refer to that attribute needs to parse the HTML and merge it back into the content lines. Not a huge deal.
I don’t understand “nerd” to be an insult. It’s rather that my knowledge in this field is rather superficial from what I pick up here and there while doing my work. But there’s quite a substantial lack of background knowledge, and I don’t feel too much inclined to learn all these things. Though I find it fascinating to get some glimpses of how, for example, website development works.