Persistent user options

[ajmalton]

By persistent options I mean those choices the user can make which are supposed to persist from one session to the next.

In d.o., persistent options are expressed in two ways:

• one set of options tends to be behind the Options link
• one set of options is at the foot of the page with widgets

Typical of the first set is the font and style and colour, but also the primary language, and some other things. Typical of the second set is the second language, the rubric version, and the expansion option.

But...

Under the hood this aspect is something of a dog's breakfast, and certainly contains errors, several of which I've fixed in the modernization branch, and one I recently fixed on master. Even Laszlo seems to have had trouble keeping it in order. It will be rewritten, but not immediately.

But also...

The sets of options are not applied consistently. It's not clear how much of that inconsistency is on purpose:

• The user can and must choose formatting and first language options differently for missa and for horas. This seems wrong to me.
• The user can not choose formatting options separately for mobile and desktop. But this is the one place where it might make sense.
• The second language, expansion, and versions can and must be chosen separately for Compare. Maybe this is right, but it seems needlessly complicated to me.
• The formatting options (and Papal name!) can and must be chosen separately for Compare Missa; this really might be a bug.
• The Compare Missa secondary options are just broken: but there's no Issue posted about it so maybe either no-one uses that feature (as @mbab remarked a little while ago) or none of its users understands how the options are supposed to work...
• The 'pope' and 'bishop' options ought to be applied to the ferial preces, but currently they are missa/ only.

I think it would be simpler and better if every single persistent option was applied the same way across the entire system.

Comments? Are any of the above "inconsistencies" actually of value?