[sword-devel] dictionary user content

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 7:19 PM, Matthew Talbert <ransom1982 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> My first comment on this concept would be that if it is done it should
>> probably be working with Sword modules throughout rather than
>> maintaining a separate database, as it appears to now.
>
> I'm not opposed to that, and I've even thought that parts of bpbible
> would help here (this is all python). But what is the advantage? And
> as far as I know there is no write support for Sword modules, nor is
> anyone working on that. Also, with this method it is easy to maintain
> meta-data about each entry and even revision history.

All Sword modules are writeable.  This support is used by osis2mod and
similar things.  BPBible actually now has Python functions to create
modules wrapping around Sword which we use when generating Sword
modules in scripts (no UI yet, unfortunately).  The advantage, IMHO,
at an application level is that the application remains integrated and
everything behaves in the same way (at least theoretically).  It is
probably less compelling here, but you will need to produce Sword
modules eventually.

As for revision history, I will agree this is probably important, but
I do know that it has been suggested in the past and rejected.

>> I'm not sure I'm convinced that a separate application for distributed
>> proofreading is needed.  The impression I get is that the Sword
>> project (and other Sword module makers) largely work from converting
>> source copies into the Sword format, and so in general what is needed
>> is one person to develop a conversion script from the source, rather
>> than a distributed effort.  Though I'm not saying that we can't change
>> to do that, I'm not convinced that it will work or be useful.  Having
>> a better way of notifying problems might be useful.
>
> I don't want to criticize, but it appears to me that this method of
> working with modules is one of the weakest links in the sword project.
> There is very little way the average person can contribute to this,
> and there are gaps in the documentation for creating modules for
> developers as well.

I don't disagree that there are better ways to do it than how it is
currently done.  I'm just informing you that this is the attitude
here.  I am also not convinced that a community will form around this.
 If it does then it may produce good results, but I'm not sure it will
be very useful for existing texts (though, as you mention, they
themselves are generally imperfect).

IMHO the Crosswire module creation and maintenance process is much
more opaque than it needs to be, but I'm not sure that that will
change (feel free to try).

>> Our applications in general need better module editing support, I
>> suspect (with Gnomesword being a possible exception, but I haven't
>> used it recently enough to know).  That is possibly related to this,
>> and possibly separate.
>
> Gnomesword supports editing both personal commentaries and prayer
> lists / daily journals.
>
>> Probably neither ThML nor OSIS are going to be very clean for editing
>> on the web unless you are using some kind of rich editing support with
>> good cross-references, formatting and similar, which is not a small
>> undertaking.
>
> It is my intention to either have a rich text editor or fully support
> markdown http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
> Either way, there would be a tool to create references.

Fine.

Jon