[sword-devel] Config file for thml module

Mon Nov 29 20:19:54 MST 2010

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Trevor Jenkins
<trevor.jenkins at suneidesis.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> And ThML continues to be used to create Bible modules because it is the best
>> tool for module creators who care about their presentation more than some
>> semantic dream world of markup.
>
> Um, strictly speaking a markup scheme (such as ThML) is divorced from
> presentational issues. Markup should identify document structure it
> shouldn't deal with display at all. But then having been a member of
> IEC/ISO TC1/SC18/WG8 at the time SGML was being standardised I have a very
> dogmatic view of markup; generalised not procedural. Sadly after all our
> efforts in WG8 to separate the two things the creators of HTML mixed them
> up again. Duh!

Strictly speaking there is only one valid response to this.

$$$Response
<h1>ROFL</h1>

Sorry, that is presentationally oriented. Let me try again.
<html>
  <head><title>Response</title></head>
  <body><h1>ROFL</h1></body>
</html>

Whoops, that's still a hybrid of semantic and presentation markup.  Let's see...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head dir="rtl">
    <title>Response</title>
    <base href="http://greg.thehellings.com" />
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
    <style type="text/css">.heading1 { font-size: 250% }</style>
  </head>
  <body dir="rtl"*/>
    <div><span class="heading1">ROFL</span></div>
  </body>
</html>

How am I doing?  I had to run it through the validator to realize that
I can't directly place a <span> within the <body> tag but I have to
first indicate that I am in a <div> before I can wrap a <span> around
it.  I'm sure there's something semantically wrong about <span> but I
can't figure out what it is.

Sorry, but I'll keep the presentation markup, when my source input is
more or less presentational, and the people I'm doing the work for are
concerned about its presentation and not about its semantic nature.
Something that the semantic-only crowd seems to forget: for automatic
processing, the markup is the conveyor of semantics; for humans, the
presentation is the conveyor of semantics. Since these are modules
destined for human display and consumption, then presentation is of
paramount importance.  That is why HTML was so successful - it
acknowledges that print and graphical media destined for human
consumption is most importantly presentational and gives (relatively)
easily machine-readable and human-readable PRESENTATIONAL markup.

It must be working, because of the two main formats that are available
(semantic OSIS and presentational ThML) I'd venture to guess that ThML
is the more common in SWORD modules.  I'm open to being wrong, but I
would guess that I'm not.

--Greg

>
> Regards, Trevor
>
> <>< Re: deemed!
>
>
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