Westminster Leningrad Codex Tanach

I was reading YudelLine today and was intrigued by a pointer to The Internet Sacred Text Archive, and started following some links until I stumbled across the The Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) Tanach. It’s an incredibly well-annotated copy of the Hebrew Bible, and this online copy is easy to navigate.

From a technological standpoint I’ve long been skeptical of XSLT and DHTML. They promise a lot of functionality but bring with them a ton of complexity, and I’ve never been convinced that the tradeoff was worth it. This is one of the first applications I’ve seen that’s clearly more powerful than the good ol’ 1994 Web (all of the logic on the server-side) but isn’t too complex to understand. I need to stare at the code a bit to learn what they’re doing, but on first glance it looks like really simple XML with a sprinkling of XSL and the sarissa Javascript library to control the display of parts of document at runtime.

Funny what you end up learning when you follow a few random links…