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

[Chris Little]

Lynn,

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 don't see anything like this in the mailing list archives. Firtly 
though, "apparently barely alive" may be the appearance because the 
majority of activity on the list is from 3rd parties who don't know OSIS 
well asking minor questions to help them over temporary difficulties. 
Most of the TC are on the list, but there's never really been much 
discussion on the list except with regard to specific problems of encoders.

The "eventually" you references was about 3 years ago, IIRC.

A text that comments on a passage of scripture would use <div> to divide 
major divisions (sections, etc.) and <p> to divide paragraphs. You can 
include a <verse> element (or set of <verse> elements enclosed in a 
<div> or <chapter> or whatever). On the top level of your commentary on 
the verse(s), you'll add an annotateType indicating, e.g., "commentary" 
or "meditation" and an annotateRef pointing to the section you're 
discussing.

> I'm not an O.W.L. (ordinary working linquist), but my overall reaction 
> was "this OSIS isn't usable yet and doesn't look very promising for what 
> I'm interested in trying to do."

The only thing I saw in the mailing list thread that could be 
interpreted as incomplete was an XSLT for Bible portions. You probably 
need to write that yourself, anyway, though. All OSIS promises to do is 
provide you a means to encode your text.

--Chris