[sword-devel] Semantic problem: real module names vs. Abbreviation=XYZ

[DM Smith]

This assumes uni-directional use of an abbreviation. Once it is used for input, that is bi-directional, given by a user by typing or otherwise, it has a problem.

> On Sep 1, 2015, at 9:45 PM, Kahunapule Michael Johnson <kahunapule at eBible.org> wrote:
> 
> The uniqueness of an abbreviation is not required as long as you never try to look up which module corresponds to that abbreviation. If all you do is use the abbreviation as a short way to display which text is selected, i.e. just looking up the abbreviation given the module name, collisions are no big deal. If you look at both the language code and the abbreviation when doing lookups, collisions are avoided.
> 
> Module ID -> abbreviation is OK.
> abbreviation -> Module ID is not OK.
> language ID + abbreviation -> Module ID is OK.
> 
> But the "not OK" case is in active use, now. Sigh.
> 
> Possible solutions:
> Stop doing that, and always require a full module ID whenever you want to find a module. (Requires some software rewriting and distribution.)
> Require that all module abbreviations are globally unique across well over 1,000 translations. (This precludes using locally meaningful and traditional abbreviations in many cases, and results in longer abbreviations.)
> Let the user assign abbreviations and disallow assignment of a duplicate. (You could suggest a default.)
> Personally, I don't like the idea of burdening the user with managing unique abbreviations, unless you have working defaults so that this level of customization is not required.
> 
> As an aside, finding and picking the Bible(s) you want to read has gotten a bit more challenging. One long pulldown list isn't a great idea, now. It helps to have a way to search with some sort of hierarchy, like Country->Language->Translation and/or have a filter box to apply. This is something we do in inScript. (See http://eBible.org/study/ <http://ebible.org/study/> or http://inScript.org <http://inscript.org/> -- the latter has more Bibles on it.) That is a front end issue I'm not going to touch, right now, other than to point out the elephant in the UI room and go back to making it even more challenging by adding more Bibles. ;-) 
> 
> On 09/01/2015 12:42 PM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
>> On Tue, 2015-09-01 at 18:19 -0400, Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
>>> On 09/01/2015 09:29 AM, DM Smith wrote:
>>>> Having Abbreviation=KJV for a Thai module is clearly not the 
>>>> intent. To use it within a repo with uniqueness by language is 
>>>> entirely a bad idea.
>>> I'm glad I didn't misunderstand this aspect.
>> Michael explains that "KJV" is what is - at least in missionary circles
>> - used for the ThaiKJV. So, yes, this is the intent for Abbreviation as
>> a user friendly option.
>> 
>> Certainly I can see that within the Latin script area there may well be
>> clashes for some modules - and we should simply not ever assume that
>> the Abbreviation entry will always be unique across all repos and all
>> modules in existence. 
>> 
>> It _must_ be unique for a user - and either the computer or the user
>> must be able to resolve clashes.
>> 
>> But we should neither assume uniqueness nor rely upon that until a
>> frontend has given for a particular moment the "all clear".  
>> 
>> Peter
>> 
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> 
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> Kahunapule Michael Johnson
> 
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