[sword-devel] virtual modules

[DM Smith]

Chris Little wrote:
>
>
> DM Smith wrote:
>
>> If I understand correctly, the osisIDs are to form a nesting 
>> hierarchy. If it weren't for the fact that an element with an osisID 
>> can start in one document element and finish outside of it, I think 
>> elements with osisIDs could be represented with begin and end tags 
>> and not milestoned.
>> That is,
>> <tag osisID="y" sID="y">... <tag eID="y">...<tag osisID="w" 
>> sID="w">...<tag eID="w">
>> and never
>> <tag osisID="y" sID="y">...<tag osisID="w" sID="w">... <tag 
>> eID="y">...<tag eID="w">
>>
>> If it is truly nesting then it may be fairly straightforward to 
>> understand a non-bible.
>
> Ideally osisIDs might be nested, but realistically there is no reason 
> to trust that they are.
I agree. If the dtd/schema can't prevent it, xml tools won't either. 
Then it is up to authors to prevent it and we are in the realm of 
mistakes and bending of the rules.
>
> Since you can (and often must) place osisIDs not only on elements that 
> represent the basic structure of a document (e.g. book/chapter/verse 
> in a Bible), but also on elements that frequently cross these 
> boundaries, like paragraphs, quotations, poetry, and pages. 
I did notice that it can occur on almost any element and those that 
can/do overlap. I was thinking more of the elements that would be looked 
at to construct a table of contents, the major divisional elements. And 
my guess is that these cannot simply be discovered but will need some 
declarative metadata to drive the parsing process.
> And that is to say nothing of the possibility of multiple reference 
> systems marked within a single document (potentially on the same 
> tags). So you have to be smart about which elements (and which 
> osisIDs) you actually index if your objective is just to pull out a 
> good reference system into the text.
Didn't think it was going to be easy. But I was going to start with 
Bibles, since their structure is more well known and the problem space 
would be greatly reduced. Besides, OSIS is not quite there yet for 
describing a commentary (though one could use Bible markup, if it is a 
verse by verse commentary) or a dictionary.