[sword-devel] proposed patch: adding n=X marker content to footnotes and xrefs

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com> writes:
> You are using Lockman and the NASB as your example because of its
> prevalence all over the web.

[a] There is indeed an irritating difference between print publication
and electronic publication in footnote standards.  I argued a bit some
years ago with bible.org people over the fact that NET in print uses
note#s that start over per-page, but electronically uses notes that span
a chapter.  So in Xiphos I see Luke.1.80#245 but the same note in print
is #16.  bible.org basically told me that they don't care.  I think
they're wrong exactly because of the need for uniform cite-ability: I'm
teaching The Theology Program at my church, where I have one person
using a print NET, and I can't reference footnotes from Xiphos in a
manner that works for him.  This is a bug in publishing standards, *not*
in the concept of uniform footnoting.

[b] That said, in electronic presentation, when material is presented
monolithically, that is, at least a chapter at a time (not in small
sub-citations of a few verses, and especially not from a search result
-- these examples are red herrings), there is usually uniform
presentation of notes.  And ESV, as one especially good contrary example
of this, provides n=X in a manner that is actually consistent with
print, that is, you can compare Gen.1 in print -vs- at biblegateway.org
-vs- in Xiphos, and you will find that "Gen.1.29#t" is the same in all.
This should be a huge lesson for us: Somebody actually did it right.

But my reason for using Greg's note above as a jumping-off point is:

[c] NASB is a useless example for citation comparison because it is a
dead module in Sword.  It was years ago that I made an excruciatingly
clear point to a private subset of heavily-involved Sword developers,
regarding NASB having already (then) taken FIVE YEARS without having
achieved status as a released product, wondering at that time if it
would take another FIVE YEARS to get there.  It has now been THREE-PLUS
YEARS since then, still waiting to get out the door.  We need
substantially less than another TWO YEARS of procrastination to finish a
measly half weekend's worth of effort to achieve THE FULL DECADE of
pointless delay I worried about (sarcastically, at the time...or so I
thought...apparently I was within epsilon of the mark).

Ergo, there is no sense whatever in even asking the question of whether
NASB will render properly, because for Sword it will never be seen by
enough of a user population (you know -- people who aren't Sword
developers themselves) either to notice or to care.  Nothing that takes
a decade to come to fruition in computer science has any business being
undertaken or implemented at all.