[sword-devel] Tagging verses and verse lists

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> Martin Gruner wrote:
> > Will this be a part of Sword?
> >
> > Troy, what do you say?
>
> Since most of our frontends have some type of verse list functionality,
> I would like for us to have something common in the engine we can all
> use.  This will also benefit our users, allowing them to share these
> between applications.  We would all have to agree on an interface
> though, so I'd appreciate hearing from other frontend developers on the
> proposed functionality and interface.

So I'll give my 10 eurocents.

I would like to see some standard for bookmarks. It would be great if we
could share them between platforms/applications. But I think, like Troy,
that passage list is a bit restricted for bookmarks. BibleTime uses a
tree for bookmarks though it's quite limited in other aspects.

I don't know enough about the Sword engine or other frontends to give
any accurate suggestions but instead of a new task-specific Manager and
API calls I would like to see a more general framework for
interapplication data exchange.

We already have a treelike structure (which can be flat as well) in form
of genbook module. It can contain headers, text and links, just like
bookmarks do. If OSIS genbooks could be writable - I don't know if they
are - we could just write a standard which could be a small subset of
OSIS plus some custom tags. Then the engine would be free from extra
Managers and API calls, the applications just had to follow the standard
when interpreting the xml data. This of course requires some mechanism
to differentiate between real modules and application data modules. That
would be the responsibility of the engine and API.

The standard could be flexible enough to enable specialized uses and
application specific tags. HTML already works like that - if a tag is
not recognized it's ignored. That way the applications could add their
own data to the data which the other apps could still use.

This approach would have the benefit of integration to the existing
frameworks, for example search and cross-module linking. With this kind
of system someone could write a barebone systematic theology as
bookmarks and if a frontend could link Bible references in all modules
to Bible module verses the frontend would not have to implement any
special code to link bookmarks, too.

This would also give the application programmers the freedom to save any
kind of private data with the existing framework. The engine just should
have a way to read and write files given as arguments. Platform and
application independent files could have special names or special API
calls.


BTW, I have also thought about a highlighting feature for Bible modules.
That could also be implemented with existing editable commentary module
and a new data standard instead of per-application custom file type or
API.

Anyways, I would like to see more co-operation between applications
whether it be in the engine or in the form of common standards.


  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)