[sword-devel] Tagging verses and verse lists

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, DM Smith wrote:
> I see them as the same thing from an implementation level. The
> application is free to use the mechanism in various ways: Bookmarks,
> Topic lists, saved state, ..... How the application presents them to
> the user gives the appearance of transience or permanence.

The engine and api would define the "syntax" (implemantation) but the
user interface gives the "semantics". For semantics we must have a
standard, otherwise we will have the same situation as with the Personal
Commentary. It has syntax (technical implementation) but no semantics
(which markup to use).

For app specific lists their is no need for standards but if we are
talking about interchangeable bookmarks they are necessary. For example:

What encoding should be used for headers/comments? If I had my will done
we would use only utf8 (as you probably could guess :). Otherwise it has
to be given with each piece of text separately because it cannot be
guaranteed that different frontends which edit the same bookmark list
use the same encoding.

How are headers/topic texts/comments used? How long can they be?  If one
frontend accepts one km long text and another one accepts one line of
255 characters there will be problems.

Is any markup allowed in texts? Which one?

Is one bookmark one verse, one verse range, several verse ranges? (This
can actually be a technical implementation question.)

Which data fields should be used with bookmarks? Are there any fields
which are implemented in techical level but should not be used with
bookmarks? (For example, if one fronted accepts comments and the end
user writes comments for individual verses which are important to him
and then moves the bookmarks to another app, he looses the comments
if another app thinks that bookmarks should not have comments.)



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