[sword-devel] SWORD link, and other misc. comments

[DM Smith]

On Feb 4, 2007, at 4:18 AM, Chris Little wrote:

> Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
>> It would be nice to extend SWORD linking, first to differentiate  
>> between
>> self references and general Bible references, as I think adding 'self
>> referencing' give us the most bang for our... er... well,  
>> sacrifice of
>> time.  A full blown mechanism to reference any exact work doesn't  
>> sound
>> hard initially, but we've talked about this when defining the OSIS
>> specification and it gets pretty crazy when you start defining  
>> fallback
>> behavior if the user doesn't have exactly the module defined, but
>> something close.
>
> I think, in order to handle the necessary mapping, we would need to
> maintain a registry of modules that we support linking to, along with
> some method for customization so that users can specify which Spanish
> language Bible they prefer or which dictionary they prefer to handle
> Greek Strong's refs.

Perhaps I am being simplistic, but I don't see it as all that hard to  
have a full blown reference system for Sword modules. I think the  
problem is hard if we talk about OSIS documents in the abstract.

First, Sword has a classification system of modules: Bible,  
Commentary, Dictionary (subdivided into Daily Devotional, Strong  
Greek/Hebrew Dictionary, General Dictionary), ... Maybe we don't have  
a default for all of these types, but we do for most.

Second, every Sword module has a key name like KJV, ESV, ... and this  
is defined in the conf at the beginning between the [].

If we require external general references to be of the form:
Type.Work
or
Type

where:
Type is Bible, Commentary, DailyDev, Strongs, Dict, ... (some well  
defined list) and is backed by the default mechanism in the  
applications (perhaps extended for more types)
and
Work is the Sword "key name"

Then for a given reference with a Type.Work kind of prefix the  
application would try to find that work locally, and if not found,  
perhaps offer the user the chance to download it, otherwise using the  
user's choice of default for the Type.

Later when we get into alternate versification, we may need to extend  
the default mechansim to allow a default by versification scheme and  
for a module to declare its versification scheme for Bible references.

Undoubtedly, there would need to be some changes to osis2mod (for  
example, it only handles Bibles) as its purpose is to transform an  
OSIS document into one that can work as a Sword module. The osisRef's  
prefixes may need to be remapped to the expected format.