[sword-devel] search idea

[Gary Amirault]

Hi, I'm new to this list. I'm not a programmer. I'm VERY interested in
seeing better and free translations of the Bible be made available to the
world. I'm kind of a radical, very hungry to see people set free. If there
are any other zealots on this list, I would like to speak to some of them
regarding electronic Bibles and what can be done. I haven't seen the Bible
program produced by you folks here yet. Hope Troy sends me a copy soon.
Please email me if you are a zeolot anxious to get better translations of
the Bible to the world. Thanks, Gary

Gary Amirault
Tentmaker Publications
118 Walnut
Hermann, MO 65041

tentmaker@ktis.net
http://www.tentmaker.org

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-sword-devel@crosswire.org
[mailto:owner-sword-devel@crosswire.org]On Behalf Of Paul Gear
Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2000 4:22 AM
To: sword-devel@crosswire.org
Subject: Re: [sword-devel] search idea


Matthias Ansorg wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
>
> >>>(By the way, where is a specification of ThML?)
> >>
> >> Try http://www.ccel.org/ThML/ThML1.0.htm
> >
> >Thanks. At first glance this is a real heavy weight markup scheme in the
> >sense that all the element names are very long. I'd like to see some
> >minimisation there. But comments upon ThML will have to wait until I've
got
> >more time.
>
> Right. It is the same problem like with HTML where ThML is based on:
unnecessarily long tag
> names blow up the file size without addional information. The
specifications of ThML were 90K in
> version 0.93 (PDF) and 240K in version 1.0 (HTML) - this is not due to the
new features ...
> Another issue is the ability to memorize the tag names when learning a
markup language.

If file size is a problem, throw in a gzip in the file I/O part.  I
understand zlib works pretty well
there, and bzip2 also has a library.  Far better to do that than to have a
markup where you're not
sure whether '<bt>' means 'book title' or 'bibliography text'.  Long tag
names take up more space, but
this can be overcome with compression, and the benefits for
understandability are enormous.  (And if
you start complaining about too many keystrokes, i'll start talking about
macros...  ;-)

Basing ThML on HTML has another big benefit: most editors already understand
75% of the tags.  This is
important if we are ever to get a large body of literature that is freely
available.

Paul
---------
"He must become greater; i must become less." - John 3:30
http://www.bigfoot.com/~paulgear