[osis-editors] suggested corrections

[Michael Paul Johnson]

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While attempting to encode the Holy Bible in Tok Pisin (Melanesian 
Pidgin, a language spoken widely in Papua New Guinea) in OSIS, I 
discovered two more serious limitations in the OSIS specification & 
documentation.

The first difficulty came in attempting to encode the required 
xml:lang attribute on the osisText element. There is no 2-letter code 
for this language. Two-letter codes for languages are inadequate for 
Bible translation use, because there are over 6,000 living languages 
spoken today on this planet. Two-letter codes are limited to 676 
combinations. Three letters could work, albeit a bit cryptically, 
using SIL Ethnologue codes. Tok Pisin does have a perfectly good 
three-letter Ethnologue code (PDG), which I tried to insert, and that 
caused a validation failure. Suggestion: make this attribute OPTIONAL, 
but require the header/work/language element, which does allow 
language type "SIL".

The second difficulty came in encoding verse identifiers for verse 
bridges. Because of word order constraints and translational 
considerations, it is often better to translate more than one verse as 
a unit. A few less literal translations and paraphrases even in 
English use verse bridges, too. In these cases, the verses are marked 
with a range. Allowing an osisID range in the same way as an osisRef 
range would solve this problem. OSIS is not usable for a broad range 
of Bible texts without a good way to encode verse bridges. I recommend 
using the same syntax for verse bridge OSIS IDs as for OSIS 
references, but document that the meaning of this syntax for an osisID 
is for a verse bridge, and should not be used to identify passages 
that really are translated verse by verse.

One minor point I noticed while attempting to convert the World 
English Bible and Hebrew Names Version to OSIS 2.0 was that footnote 
start tags had no equivalent in OSIS. These are the tags that make it 
easy to convert the text that a note refers to into a hyperlink (as 
you will see in, for example, http://eBible.org/web/John.htm, which 
was converted from web.gbf in http://eBible.org/web/webgbf.zip). For 
now, I threw in some milestone elements with x-startNoteAnchor 
attributes at those points. The equivalent element in XSEM is the 
"anchor" element.

Thank you for your work towards making OSIS a usable standard. It 
isn't too far off...





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