README

Bible Linkifier is a Chrome extension that searches for text in web pages
that look like scripture references and turns them into links to the
referenced passage.

As it's my first attempt at a Chrome extension and I've only just
decided to make it, currently it is only a copy of the source code to
Mappy, from the Google Code Labs samples collection.  I hope to knock
it out quickly in my spare time.

Planned features:
- Links to Bible Gateway
  - Eventually, use your own preferred site
- Popups for short passages
  - Option for scrolling popup or "continue reading" link
- Parse common translation abbreviations if given with reference
- Choose your preferred translation
  - Allow choice between cited and user-preferred translation
- Optional (on/off) feature: highlight visible refs as they are found
- Make sure not to interfere with the user's interactions
  with the open page. Possible approaches to consider:
  - Put text processing on a background thread if possible.
  - Only search text that is currently visible, plus a little
    scroll-ahead.
  - Prefer to search when the user is not scrolling.
- Fix bugs that show up in other Bible linkifiers.
  - Overzealous matching (see jquery.com, things like '1-3')
  - An extension called "Bible Verse Linker" does not work
    for me on twitter.com, for reasons I haven't yet 
    investigated, though I suspect it has something to do with
    conflict with Twitter's own linkification code


Possible tasks for later:
- Pull out the 'linkification' code into a reusable library.
  - (Actually, this will be my design approach from the start,
     but it may take time to figure out the right API and features,
     which will evolve with my extension, so doing this formally
     will come later.)
  - There appear to exist general linkification libraries for 
    Javascript, but at a glance I didn't see any that help
    developers turn regex-matched strings into domain-specific
    links.  I aim to take out some of the legwork common to any
    such linkifier, as described above.