[sword-devel] Thoughts on software used in Exegesis

[Chris Little]

David Bell wrote:
> Greetings!
> 
> I started to fool with an idea a few months back but have had other 
> issues that have taken me away from my efforts with sword (open heart 
> surgery). Anyway, I realized a while back that if Sword can read thml 
> documents then it can really handle html.

Support of ThML is limited and support of HTML is even more limited in 
Sword. Those frontends that use HTML for rendering would obviously have 
no trouble with HTML content, but the Windows frontend, which is most 
common, does not support much. In fact, <a> is, I believe, the only 
actual HTML tag that is interpreted without modification.

> I discovered this by leaving a 
> live link to the internet in a module that I was working on. When it 
> came up in blue, I clicked it to see what would happen. To my surprise, 
> it loaded the web page. Why am I talking about all this? Everything you 
> are talking about has been done by a guy named Zack Hubert on his 
> website www.zhubert.com <http://www.zhubert.com>. He has the Greek text 
> completely parsed and linked up to various dictionaries. He even has 
> various English texts you can view along side of the Greek. One simple 
> way to get these features into Sword is to simply make a module that 
> loads this website. Obviously this would mean that the user would have 
> to be connected to the internet, but it adds a huge amount of material 
> and possibilities. 

We used to have a module that loaded from the internet (the JFB module). 
Users hated it because they hated the latencies and the non-uniform look 
and the fact that they had to be connected to the internet. So we have a 
module type that specifically grabs a web-page and puts in it the 
commentary window, but we'll likely never use it again. I don't even 
know that frontends other than BibleCS have support for it.

Hubert's site looks nice, but I don't see anything that we don't already 
have access to in other formats. In fact, I don't see anything he has 
that isn't already available in Sword other than the Perseus data, some 
of which we may or may not release, depending on copyright restrictions.

--Chris