[sword-devel] File formats; update status

[Kahunapule Michael P. Johnson]

At 18:27 16-08-04, chrislit at crosswire.org wrote:
>How about an XML version of GBF?  I think it's not being XML is the most 
>annoying missing feature of GBF at the moment.

I thought about that, and the idea has some merit. I even started to define it, and called it GBX. However, I probably won't use that, because I think that I might have a better idea: an XML version of USFM. In other words, an XML format such that every markup element of USFM has an exact equivalent element in the XML markup, and such that a round-trip conversion from USFM to its XML cousin and back causes no loss of information. (It may cause some normalization, in the case where some tags are equivalent, like \mt1 and \mt, and in cases where overlapping ranges were converted to nested ranges of attributes, but no change in meaning.)

>USFM is probably pretty good for our purposes since we have good USFM to 
>OSIS converters.  I don't think there's any way to mark Words of Christ in 
>USFM, though (not according to the code manual last time I looked, 
>anyway).

I already generate USFM for the World English Bible that marks the Words of Christ adequately without violating the standard. Unfortunately, the markers I used may be used for other types of quotations, too, so the semantics of USFM are a little fuzzy with this marker set. That is fixable, though, if not with USFM, it certainly is with an XML derivative of USFM.