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

[Kahunapule Michael Johnson]

Chris Little wrote:
> Kahunapule Michael Johnson wrote:
>> First, please let me apologize. By the personal attacks in your message,
>> you may have gotten the impression that I was attacking you personally
>> instead of promoting the idea that OSIS is not appropriate to set forth
>> as a standard format for use in Bible translation and Scripture file
>> archiving. 
>
> I didn't take it as a personal attack, but I did take it, by the
> manner in which it was delivered to sword-devel (really not an
> appropriate forum for discussing the merits of OSIS), as an offensive
> and abusive attack with a specific intent to stir controversy.
I'm sorry. That was not my intention. My intention was to get people to
THINK about the wisdom or lack thereof of using OSIS based on the merits
or lack thereof of that standard versus possible alternatives that exist
or could be created. It is possible, and even likely, that I'm not the
only one who would believe that OSIS leaves a great deal of room for
improvement.
> Your complaints boil down to basically two categories:
>
> 1) You want preservation of presentational forms of quotation marks.
> This was addressed at length already, yet manages to earn about half
> of the text of your complaints against OSIS. I'm sorry it's not
> codified in prose for you yet, but everyone at the last OSIS TC
> meeting was in agreement that it was already part of the standard (<q
> n="'">-type encoding).
Apparently, amending the documentation to reflect those changes and
openly publishing the results has not been a high priority.

This change, once fully implemented in documentation and properly
published, would elevate OSIS from unusable without modification to
usable but not the best choice for any of the applications I'm
responsible for. Thank you for the improvement. My position will not
change until I see the open standard living up to its name and being
openly published in its "current" form. After that really, fully
happens, I'll be content to oppose OSIS less vigorously. Until then,
please don't assume malice on my part, and I'll try to do the same for
you, in spite of our obvious disagreements. I have no delusion that we
will ever agree on everything concerning OSIS, but I would hope we could
be civil about it... maybe even Christ-like.