The Blazor Sofist

There's a new low level language in browsers called WebAssembly. Microsoft has built an experimental mechanism for running .NET virtual machines on WebAssembly called Blazor. That means that .NET languages like C# can now be used to write apps for web browsers.

I've written a simple Blazor app for a new, post-codex, "book". The first third of Heidegger's lectures on Plato's Sophist, which are about Aristotle's Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics. The app has the English and German text. I call the app Preliminary Sofist.

I've written the C# code to link Greek words on a page to their wiki entry, if that entry exists, the first time the word appears on a page. And, code to decorate Greek words with their English translation, if it appears in the glossary at the back of the book, so that the translation appears when the pointer hovers over the Greek word.

When Blazor's features improve, I want to add a dialog with Greek help, that pops up on double-clicking a Greek word, like I did with the Angular 5 Volpi app last year.

The app only works with Chrome. I use the IFrame srcdoc attribute to insert the page content into the app. Edge doesn't fully support HTML5.

I couldn't figure out how to get the app's URL routing to work from a sub-folder on a web site, so I had to host the app on its own domain.

I still have to proof-read and correct OCR errors from 2/3s of the German text, and add all the Greek words to the glossary and wiki links.