Formatting within Sefaria Texts

On occasion it becomes necessary to convey information about a specific word or location within a segment. A common example is text formatting - the structure we outlined in The Structure of a Book on Sefaria does not allow for any method of telegraphing that some words need to be formatted in one way or another.

A common solution is to use html/xml tags within a segment. A major drawback of this is that such data stored within the specific version of the text as opposed to on the index (which provides structure universal to all versions of the text). Unfortunately, this is the best method we currently have for including sub-segment level data.

Text Formatting

Formatting text is relatively straightforward. One must only wrap the text that is to be formatted in an appropriate html tag. So, if one wish to mark a word as bold, I would simply wrap it in a <b> tag. This is commonly used in commentaries that start off with a quote from the text they are commenting on (דיבור המתחיל).

Footnotes

Footnotes contain two parts - a marker (usually a number) and text. Footnotes can be added to text using a <sup class="footnote-marker"> tag and an <i class="footnote"> tag for the marker and text respectively. An example of a segment with a footnote:

The main text is here <sup class="footnote-marker">1</sup><i class="footnote">The text inside the footnote</i>and the main text continues here.

For an example of a footnote on Sefaria, see the asterisk in the first verse of Genesis in this version.

Inline Reference

Sometime a commentary will refer to a specific word or phrase within another text, but will not quote such a text. In printed books, a marker similar to a footnote can be found. Placing an entire commentary inside the parent text as we did with footnotes is not acceptable. In such a case, we display a small marker within the segment that will become apparent to the user when a commentary that requires such a reference is selected in the sidebar.

Creating such a reference requires data to exist not only within the text segment, but also on the link between the commentator and the parent text. The parent segment will contain an <i> tag with the css properties data-commentator and data-order. The data-commentator field must match the collective_title of the text (i.e. so for Rashi on Genesis, the data-commentator would match the collective_title of Rashi), and data-order will usually match the segment number of the linked comment (the exception to this rule is when individual comments are so long that they have their own internal structure - in such cases the section number can be used). In addition an optional data-label can be added - this is an all purpose override of any display logic - whatever this is set to is what will be displayed.

The link object requires the field inline_reference. The value of inline_reference will be a dictionary with keys data-commentator, data-order and data-label(optional) whose values will be identical to what was set in the <i> tag in the parent segment.

Parent segment:
Lorem ipsum <i data-commentator="Child" data-order="1"></i>consectetur adipiscing elit.

Link Object:

{
    'refs': ['Parent 1:1', 'Child 1:1'],
    'type': 'commentary',
    'inline_reference': {
        'data-commentator': "Child",
        'data-order': 1
    }
}

Here as well, the data-commentator field must match the collective_title of the commentator.

Allowed HTML Tags and Attributes

Below is a chart of all of the allowed HTML tags in Sefaria texts, with their corresponding attributes (if any exist) and how they are used within the library:

Allowed HTML Tags with Corresponding Attributes

The following are a list of allowed HTML tags that have associated attributes. The table provides insight both into the tags and attribute supported by Sefaria, and how we specifically use them within texts in our library.

Allowed HTML Tags

The following tags are allowed on Sefaria, and do not have any supported attributes associated with them.