My insomnia's treacherous imagination
So one of the things that suggests to me that I might really be a software developer after all, and not simply a writer manqué (though I am him, too), is that after reluctantly discarding the idea of dropping my insomniac vision of a three-dimensional laser scanner on Hengest (hey, if Rowenna can remember forward 150 years to 597, and no that won't make the final draft but I know it's there, why shouldn't Hengest be able to remember forward 1549 years to present-day laser technology?), and thinking some more about the future genealogy of the characters (Rowenna's forward leap to her great-N-grandson in 597 was a very early part of the story, and based on what happened later, it would be tricky for Æthelberht of Kent to be her great-N-grandson after all. But I could make it happen, if Œric [Iurmanric's father and Æthelberht's grandfather, in Frankia in 540] were not descended from Hengest and Horsa/Ash but from Hengest and Hretha, Eadwynn and Emrys), my mind switches to some software that draws hyperlinkable family trees. And from thinking I'd have to write the whole thing myself, I realized that there must already be an xml schema for genealogical stuff (yep), though there might need to be additions to get the different colours for different houses (remember, in the new version, Hengest is a Jute, Horsa/Ash a Danish foster-son [hmm, do you suppose the xml schema understands foster-children? Or that there is an agreed way of displaying them?], and Hretha possibly a Saxon, to say nothing of the interlinkings between the Germans and the Britons), and one suspects it could be xslted to a text format that could be plotted in GraphViz. Then all I need is something to build an imagemap so that the individual nodes can be hyperlinked to text files or database entries...