[osis-users] Using the attribute in <verse> tags

[Simon Lindén]

I'm working on the layout and typography of a Swedish Bible translation that's currently in production. I'm getting the text files as .doc and will have to do most of the formatting myself. The publisher has requested that I convert the finished thing to XML so that it's easily available for other publishers that want to use this translation. I've been looking around for a while to see if there are any standards that I should know of when doing this and I've found OSIS (and I've also looked at USFX).

My spontaneous thought is that OSIS seems quite advanced and provides more tags/attributes than I will need but maybe that isn't a problem. I mainly have two questions at this stage that I'm hoping someone could help me answer.  

1. Is OSIS a good format to work with when it comes to updating and revising texts? That is, can the translators edit an .xml file with a word processor (only focusing on the text) and then export it back to the same format without messing up the tagging?

2. I see that the verse numbers are included as attributes to the verse tag, <verse n="1"/>, rather than including them in the actual text. Our bible versions will have printed verse numbers. How do you make these numbers show if you're styling the xml with CSS for example? Does anybody know how to make them show when importing to inDesign?

Regards,

Simon