[sword-devel] Re: radical idea

[Daniel Glassey]

On 16/06/05, Daniel Glassey <dglassey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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. :)

Oh, and just to clarify - I'm not suggesting replacing all existing
modules with this (not that I wouldn't like to ;) ) - just adding it
as an extra module type that new OSIS/ThML based modules would be
created with.

Regards,
Daniel