[sword-devel] Food for thought regarding OSIS and some of its

[DM Smith]

L.Allan-pbio wrote:
> A year or so ago, I tried pretty hard to use OSIS for what seemed to 
> be a rather simple document ... a "Sharing Tract" that was mostly 
> Bible passages. My experience was that the 3rd (or 4th?) generation of 
> OSIS was not at all capable of doing this, and the feedback from the 
> (apparently barely alive) OSIS list was that "maybe eventually".
I've had similar experience. It appears that OSIS is geared to Biblical 
texts and not other texts. The documentation regarding commentaries is 
lacking. (Supposedly the support is present.) There is no support for 
dictionaries, with the long promise that it is coming.

I've posted questions to the OSIS mailing list regarding dictionaries 
that seemed to generate little traction.
The manual on the OSIS website was broken under Firefox and now the 
website is next to useless.

I have also posted questions to this list regarding the "best" practices 
for marking a commentary for the creation of a module but have received 
no reply.

With that said, I think that OSIS is usable now for Bible modules. 
Without guidance, it is not usable for commentary modules. Without an 
improvement in the spec it is not usable at all for dictionaries.

What will provide traction for OSIS is a corpus of whole documents of 
several different types marked up according to published best practices. 
These types should include Bibles, BCV based Bible commentaries, general 
biblical works, time based devotionals, and theological dictionaries.

I think that CrossWire has a unique ability to lead this effort. I think 
that we should continue to push this direction.