This project has raised a number of design questions. Among these concerns is the major question: how should these texts be presented to allow for ease in comparison? There are several minor questions, such as how to work with footnotes and the critical apparatus, the use of hypertext links, etc. This preface shall discuss some of the decisions made during the developmental stages.

This project has always been about presenting three lives of St. Edmund for a comparative study. The Internet is very well suited to allow one to change texts, allowing a single layout to be used to present two texts, either in the original languages or modern translations. In an effort to capitalize on the flexibility of HTML, as well as the benefits of having two texts side by side, this project uses frames. The Web browser should be maximized in order to show as much of the frames as possible. To reduce the clutter that affects many websites with frames, the design team decided to present only three frames. The top frame contains a navigation menu, which serves as a table of contents, and the lower frames present the information itself, be it text, translation, or apparatus. The top frame allows the user to choose which two texts will be shown, and can be used to change the texts at any time. The “Left” and “Right” buttons refer to the lower frames, and the selected text will be brought up in whichever column is selected.

All three Lives were originally presented as verse in the printed editions. With the variability in screen sizes, there is no way to guarantee the line breaks will occur in the same places for the texts and translations. In this respect, the presentation is closer to the manuscript tradition, in that it requires a closer reading of the text and an understanding of meter, rather than the more modern notion of the visual appearance of poetry, with breaks at the end of a line. Every effort has been made to ensure that the verses will be on the same lines between the text and translation, but in some cases the original text is more verbose or succinct than English, and adjustments may be necessary. Line numbers have been inserted for clarity.

As the original publications are critical editions, they make use of footnotes and critical apparatus. As all computer literate people know, there are no pages in digital texts, and the convention of placing information at the bottom of an individual page has to be reconsidered. We have decided to include footnotes at the bottom of the Anglo-Norman translation page, with hyperlinks between the note number and the note itself, as there are very few notes. This allows a reader to move quickly between note and text, just as one would do with a printed version. The critical apparatus, however, is a much more involved discussion of the text, and is not always of immediate interest or use. Because of its specialized nature, each apparatus has been separated from its text, and can be brought up as a separate file in the right-hand frame. This has the advantage of making the original files smaller, and also allows for easier comparison of variant texts, as the line in question can be parallel to the text.

--John Chandler, 11 February 2003