[sw-l] SignPuddle

[Sandy Fleming]

Hi Val!

Sorry about taking time to answer - some bits of social life got in the way
:)

> Congrats on entering the sign for Wales (smile). I extracted the .png
> image from the htm file and here it is attached to this message...Looks
> good! When you create a sign in SignMaker now, it creates two kinds of

Glad you like it - do you remember I made a big fuss about not having the
bent finger handshape for this? Well I eventually realised that the clearest
signers start this sign with the fingers straight and bend the fingers
during the movement, so the handshape I made such a fuss about isn't really
needed after all. In those days I tended to think in terms of showing each
change in handshape as a separate handshape, whereas now I'm better at
writing movements and changes in handshape are much easier to write this
way. I put the "fingers closing" dot next to the arrow to show that it
happens during the movement. I think this is good, because if I'd put it on
the fingers it could be construed as meaning that the fingers close, _then_
the hand moves down, which isn't what I mean.

It's a versatile writing system!  :)

> Did you know that SignPuddle is not on Stephen's server? We moved Sign
> Puddle to the SignBank site during the summer which means it is on my
> server....not my server in my home...but on DeafVision, where I pay an
> annual fee to host our SignBank site. And as far as I know our memory
> is ok right now, so go right ahead, Sandy, and be as creative as you
> wish! That was why we moved SignPuddle to SignBank, so we would have a
> long-lasting, ongoing server for SignPuddle... Val ;-)

It's not the memory I was worried about, but the load. Here's a link to an
example of what I meant, as requested:

http://sandyfleming.org/demo.htm

If you look at the HTML source, you'll see that I just have the same line of
HTML repeated for each sign on the page, the only thing that changes is the
gloss for the sign. So just by including the gloss for a sign as part of
this line, I can put the graphic of a SignPuddle dictionary entry anywhere
on the page, and so, if I like, build up a complete text without having to
download any graphics or put any graphics on my own server. I don't even
need any Perl, ASP, PHP or anything. The only problem would be if, in the
future, people started doing this with big and very popular web pages so
that your server got bogged down sending the graphics to everyone that
looked at these pages.

The main other disadvantage is that when a sign is changed by an editor in
the dictionary, it will change throughout all the webpages everywhere on the
web that use this method to display the sign (though this can be a good
thing, too). And if it's deleted then there'll be broken links to it
everywhere.

For some kinds of pages, however, this is more an advantage than a
disadvantage. For example, imagine if you wanted to display all known
variants of a sign (see attached gif for all the variants of "Eqypt" I've
seen in BSL :)  Then you could write a bit of code (Javascript, VB, PHP or
Perl, for example) that would take the gloss for a sign, eg "Egypt", then
display "Egypt", "Egypt_1", "Egypt_2", "Egypt_3" &c until no other signs
were found of this form. In this case, if signs were added or removed from
the dictionary, they'd be added or removed from the list on the web page
too.

But the other suggestions that have been made on the list involving SWML for
manipulation of separate symbols and suchlike are much more versatile. The
way I've described is very simple and immediately available, that's all.

Sandy
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