[sword-devel] Sword Vision -Re: free Windows compiler for SWORD

[Chris Little]

Don A. Elbourne Jr. wrote:

> In other words, the theological content of programmers is much more
> important than the theological content of pastors, teachers, theologians, or
> seminary professors.  If you would rather spend your time studying the Bible
> and writing sermons and articles rather than learning how to program,
> compile, and hand markup your text in OSIS, buzz off!

At the moment, more or less, yeah.  If you can produce OSIS (the content 
model for which is not very complex for the 99% of documents) then we'll 
find a way to deal with your content.  If you can't--write a front-end 
or bug someone else to do so.

When easy to use OSIS markup tools exist, it won't be such a problem, 
but until then I don't want to see us writing thousands of workarounds 
for badly marked content (like, say, <note/> ... </note> for an 
open/close note tag pair).

> Of course I'm being sarcastic, but that does seem to be the sentiment of the
> Sword Project. I like the idea of an Open Source Bible Software package. My
> vision is that there would be a software platform that would allow pastors
> and teachers to easily place their work into an integrated Bible software
> program.

It's the quality of the content that we're concerned with.  We don't 
currently (and probably never will) have the capability for dealing with 
all of the insanely bad markup people would generate and expect our 
system to handle gracefully.  It would just lead to horrible modules for 
which we, rather than the creators--since they have no clue what they're 
doing wrong, would get blamed.

--Chris