[sword-devel] radical idea

[Daniel Glassey]

well, you have been warned in the title. This is just thinking based
loosely on a discussion this afternoon as we are needed to decide on
storage issues. This is a medium-term suggestion - post BibleCS 1.5.8.

The first part of radical idea is to throw away the RTF output filters
(BibleCS will need to use an HTML widget or have someone implement a
windows frontend with an HTML widget which doesn't seem unreasonable
given that it is ok to wait 2 years between releases anyway ;) ).

Then, since all other frontends use HTML then why not use HTML(or
XHTML) as the basis of the storage format in sword.

CSS would be used for styling.

OSIS isn't designed for presentation so sword has to transform the
stored markup to the presentational form - HTML. It seems more
efficient to do this at module creation time rather than at runtime.

If there is any additional markup that is needed that can't be
implemented in straight HTML then it could be simple additions that
sword can recognise.

OSIS would still be the preferred base document. You would use xslt in
a new sword import program osis2work to transform it into an HTML
based sword work together with the sword indexes.
And a work2osis would have to be written to do the reverse transformation.

ThML is close enough to HTML that that conversion shouldn't be hard.
I'm not sure how to convert GBF to this, but either via a filter or
via OSIS make sense.

The objection I can come up with is that it really isn't nice to the
JSword guys who afaiu use OSIS internally, but I'll wait for that
opinion. :)

Regards,
Daniel