On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, Jonathon Blake wrote:
_CROSS_ might be in wider usage than OSIS. [At least, none of the commercial vendors brag about using OSIS. They do brag about using CROSS.]
Um. No, commercial vendors don't brag about using CROSS, the commercial vendor that owns CROSS does. CROSS is just XHTML data in a proprietary binary indexing/DRM wrapper. It's used, from what I can tell, in three branded products. Originally it was used in Bible Explorer. Then, when WORDSearch bought Bible Explorer, CROSS was used in the next version of WORDSearch. WORDSearch does advertise that they use CROSS. Now CROSS is also used by Bible Navigator, which I'm guessing is a branded version of WORDSearch, though I can't get their flash demos to work so that I can see some screenshots. They DON'T advertize (or mention) using CROSS anywhere on their website.
Based on the definitions I gave in a previous email today, CROSS, the Christian Reference Open Software Standard is neither open nor a standard. This shouldn't dissuade anyone from using CROSS-based products. It's just not comparable to OSIS--but they were defined with very different objectives in mind.
CROSS is fairly comparable to Libronix's format: both are proprietary, binary, indexed, DRM-wrapped files with end-user distribution as the primary focus. OSIS is more or less the opposite by all of these measures.
CROSS isn't even comparable to STEP since STEP was defined by committee through input from multiple groups and with the assumption that different STEP readers would be written to read the format.
--Chris _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
