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

[Greg Hellings]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Ben Morgan <benpmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> The point I was making was not that you can't encode it, but you lose the
> semantic significance of it. The user can tell that <i>test</i> was added,
> but the program can't - unless that is the only way <i> is ever used - which
> it isn't. If you use italic formatting for anything else, you have lost
> information - not presentation information - but the actual meaning is now
> inaccessible to the program, as it can't necessarily tell what a particular
> <i> means. If I want to mark translator added words in violet, or even allow
> omitting them altogether, this is now not easily possible.

My point was just that, in context, many such things are mistaken and
that the semantics of any individual portion are entirely formed by
their context.  Within English printed Bibles I am not aware of any
other usage of italics - so when I see any form of italics in
scripture, the meaning to my mind is the same whether it was encoded
with <i>, <em> or <transChange>.  I would assume the same - rightly or
wrongly - when coding for a front-end: italics in ThML Bibles are the
same as <transChange> in Bibles.  In the context of the argument of
ThML vs. OSIS, my point was that ThML has mechanisms for at least
most, possibly all, of the same material as OSIS, only encoded
differently.  At some point, the creators of OSIS decided that they
preferred using the more verbose tag <transChange> and at some point
the creators of the SWORD module also added the type="x-added" to the
KJV.  The creator of ThML figured that <i> was good enough for the
same task, since the meaning of italics has been established for a
very long time in Bible encoding (printing).  They're all just
conventions of meaning, and one is as good as another, as long as we
agree to use and support the same ones with the same meanings between
modules, the engine and front ends.

--Greg