On 03/03/2012 06:47 AM, Matěj Cepl wrote:
>> Nearly half the OSIS editor body is subscribed to this list, so please,
>> if you have an honest question about the standard, humbly ask and know
>> that there might be an answer you hadn't considered.
>
> I am not sure why I should be humble, when noticing that as a user of this 
> standard I found it very much lacking in what exactly is expected from any 
> standard: setting unequivocal rules about how to create an inter-operable 
> product with the expectation that somebody else using documents produced by 
> my software will be able to use them without a problem.
>
> Again, no personal offense meant, and I don't doubt specific knowledge of 
> anybody involved in creating OSIS standard.

My complements to you on your restraint, Matěj. I understand your 
disappointment. I also understand what OSIS actually is, and why it is that 
way. OSIS is a common format for many visions, meaning that it is really not 
just one format, but many, and subject to a variety of interpretations. The 
vision of unambiguous interoperability isn't part of OSIS, unless further 
clarified in a document like http://crosswire.org/wiki/OSIS_Bibles. Even then 
there is room for improvement. Hopefully that improvement will
take place as work proceeds.

As far as making OSIS work with verses as containers and sections and 
paragraphs/poetry elements as milestones, I tried that several years ago. The 
theory surrounding the ability to transform between dominant structures is 
sound, but OSIS doesn't really support doing that in all of the conditions I 
encountered in real Bible translations in that mode. The committee responsible 
made some assumptions about Bible formatting that were not shared by my good 
friends, the Bible translators. That means that either
the Bible formatting has to change (not an option for me), or OSIS has to 
change (not within my power to do, and contrary to its design goal of 
stability). After that disappointment, I gave up on OSIS for a while. I may try 
to generate an improper subset of OSIS sufficient to generate a Sword module 
from, replacing usfm2osis.pl, which doesn't support all of the translations I'm 
working with. I think it is worth one more try...

I applaud any effort to directly support USFM (or an equivalent XML format like 
USX) in any component of SWORD, because that is where the majority of 
minority-language translations are.

Please take a look at http://ubs-icap.org/chm/usfm/2.3/index.html and/or 
http://ebible.org/usfx/. Another XML equivalent of USFM is USX, generated by 
Paratext. USX isn't officially documented, yet, but if you can get a copy of 
Paratext and examine its USX output, you can figure it out. If you can get your 
module into any of those formats, it can be added to the 220 Scripture projects 
(and counting) that I have queued up to convert to Sword format.

As for what I think of some of the philosophical changes in OSIS vs. USFM, 
other than simply changing from \-escaped markup to XML, is probably best 
expressed at http://ergofabulous.org/luther/ on a philosophical level (not a 
personal level!) and at http://ebible.org/usfx/Bible-encoding.htm on a 
technical level. The latter document is a bit dated, but not a lot has changed 
since then except the emergence of OXES (and attempt to make OSIS more 
practical) and USX (another XML equivalent of USFM). Not every
organization who claimed to embrace OSIS actually did so in a significant and 
compliant way, for a variety of reasons. The Sword Project is the major 
exception.

For my dear brothers who worked on the OSIS standard so long for so many years, 
I appreciate your work, your sacrifice, and your intentions.

Shalom,
Michael


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