[sword-devel] Support for linked verse range markers?

[DM Smith]

IMHO, there are two separate issues here.
1) Appropriate markers for a verse.
2) Lossiness of information in the construction of an OSIS Bible module.

I'll answer the first:
As you noted it is important for the verse markers to represent the range. (In the case of JSword it is even more important not to show the verse over and over again!)

However, the control of the presentation of the verse marker should not be the content of the n attribute on the verse element. A few reasons:
1) The value of the n attribute is arbitrary. The value could be "Revelation of Saint John 3:1 to 4". Rather than the expected "1-4."
2) The user may need numbers in a different script, appropriate for their locale, say Farsi.
3) The user may have selected a frontend capability to show the marker in a particular form. E.g. Full book name in the current locale, chapter and verse. And such a form may differ from one locale to the next.

It really needs to be under the control of the frontend and perhaps the user.

However, it'd be great to have more support in the engine than the primitive isLinked (or whatever it is called) to get the verse marker. There are two specific places that it is needed: The display of the verse in context (e.g. chapter display and the display of the verse in isolation (e.g. search results list). It also has bearing on the display of verses in parallel view, which typically use table cells to house verse content. Knowing the size of the range might be useful for the computation of rowspan for HTML, for instance.

In Him,
	DM

On Feb 13, 2012, at 2:28 AM, David Haslam wrote:

> On those front-ends that I use (in Windows), for places where there are
> linked verses, the application generally displays only the verse number tag
> for the first verse of the range of text.
> 
> Yet the publishers of these translations have usually gone to the trouble to
> print a proper verse range tag.
> That we generally depart from how printed editions appear is (in this
> respect) a deficiency of our software.
> 
> Even when the OSIS source text includes the extra attribute n="X" for the
> milestoned verse element
> <verse sID="reference.m-n" osisID="reference.m" ...
> osisID="reference.n" n="m-n"/>
> it's a known fact that, from quite early on, someone made the decision to
> discard the information provided in the n="X" attribute.
> 
> The new reader, seeing the gap in adjacent verse tags, will naturally
> question, "Why are some verses [apparently] missing?" or even, "Have those
> pesky Christians corrupted the Injil?" 
> 
> So by doing what we do, we are adding needlessly to the mental obstacles
> being faced by new readers of the Bible, if all they have access to is a
> digital edition.
> 
> The lengthy ongoing discussion about footnote and reference tags is what
> prompted me to raise this new topic - though it's a subject I've been
> thinking about for quite some time.
> So I'm "striking while the iron is hot", as it were.
> 
> cf. http://crosswire.org/wiki/Talk:OSIS_Bibles#Linked_verses
> which, although related, does not directly address this point.
> 
> It's not helped by the fact that osis2mod also applies a transform which
> replaces each of the paired sID/eID attribute values with a unique value,
> but which are not related directly to the numerical values of the verse
> tags, nor indeed the actual complete references. 
> 
> David
> 
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> --
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> 
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