[sword-devel] Getting stuff done (Re: External links)

[Greg Hellings]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Matthew Talbert <ransom1982 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The advantage of this, I suppose, is that your cross-references could
>> be converted to OSIS refs later.  The disadvantage would come if you
>> lose other information when encoding in OSIS, as Ben suggested.
>
> What information would I lose? I'm new at this, so that's an honest
> question. The only formatting I'm doing is paragraph markers.

None.  Information is all relative to the context.  You lose no
information if you encode printed KJV italics terms with <i>, <em>,
<hi type="i"> or <transChange>.  It still means the exact same thing -
the enclosed text was added by translators and the module creator
wishes to maintain that.  The only time you'd lose information when
moving to OSIS is if you specifically chose to drop information out.
As for losing information if you move into ThML - I'm not fully
familiar with the ThML specification, one of the biggest problems I
have with it is that the versions I can find on the web (1.02 from
2001) don't have support for actually encoding a whole Bible.  But for
the rest of the genre which ThML supports, I see no information which
can't be represented in ThML.

>
>> I don't think a module could ever contain cross-references and be the
>> standard module unless it used reasonably well supported methods, and
>> sword:// isn't, AFAIK, and I don't really think it should be.  That
>> being the case, work is needed to support referencing properly, and
>> I'm not sure who is going to do it or when (but know I don't have time
>> to do it).
>
> What aggravates me about this, is that the official response has been
> "Use OSIS references, don't use sword://, but OSIS references aren't
> supported". Why are OSIS references being recommended when they aren't
> supported? Are there any plans to add support? (I mean concrete plans,
> not "it should be done") Why is the official recommendation to do
> something that isn't supported (notice that at least sword:// is
> supported somewhere) and there aren't plans to?

Likewise.  People (I think Chris is one of the leading people, but I
might be mistaken on that) ought to stop advocating usage of OSIS
references for the time being.  They accomplish nothing, since they
produce nonsense out the other end, being that they're not supported.
Why BibleDesktop or BibleTime or BPBible don't support sword:// is
probably because they're all working on other issues right now.  DM
already mentioned some things BibleDesktop is trying to figure out
first, the BibleTime guys are actively working on achieving
independence of the KDE libraries, Ben just explained why he can't get
support into the current version of BPBible.  However, filtering an
osisRef to a sword:// style link would all be handled by a filter,
anyway.  So whether it goes into the system encoded as sword:// or
osisRef shouldn't matter to anyone - especially now since none of it
is going to work except for sword:// in Gnomesword.