Chris Little wrote:
DM Smith wrote:
I took a look at your example and I don't know if it matters, but it has been posted here that using milestones for verses is a bad thing.
Actually, encoding <verse> tags with milestones is the OSIS best practice recommendation. If you have an extremely simplistic Bible without anything like paragraph or poetry formatting, you can go ahead and use <verse> containers, but in all other circumstances, the book/chapter/verse hierarchy is to be subordinate to the book/section/paragraph hierarchy. Book/chapter/verse is viewed as a foreign system placed over the inherent organization of the text.
I looked again at the OSIS website and could not find that verse with milestones is the best practice. I think I was able to figure out why it would be a necessary practice. It is mentioned that if any OSIS container element is used in the milestone form then that element must always use the milestone element in the entire work.
Help me if I am missing something here:
If a Bible has rich markup, then there will be a need for milestones. Lets take <q> and <verse> overlapping as in <q>...<verse>... </q>...</verse>
1) Milestones are used for <verse> and not for <q>.
2) Milestones are used for <q> and not for <verse>.
3) Milestones are used for <q> and <verse>.
If 1 is chosen then it will have the most likely side effect of requiring most, if not all other containers to be milestoned. This means: abbr, closer, div, foreign, l, lg, q, salute, seg, signed, and speech. It will be easier to use milestones for all of them unless one is certain that verses will never be split by one.
If 2 is chosen then it is likely that only verse and possibly chapter will need to be milestoned. So I can see why this may be the best practice. Also, the OSIS manual notes that pretty much the only practical consequence of a verse element is the rendering of a verse number. And of course Sword will use it to mark the start and the length of the verse in the module.
3 is the easiest to adhere to the OSIS rule of consistency in milestoning an element in a work.
Of the elements that can contain a verse, at least one, <p>, is not milestoneable. So, if a verse ever crosses one of these then using milestones for verses is a must. What is not clear from the schema is which container elements that can contain verses can hold part of a verse. For example, I don't imagine that <cell> or <item> should. <p> is specifically mentioned in the OSIS manual as allowing verses to be split.
With regard to the Sword API, it is possible to get a single verse. If the verse has an an element end tag and not its begin or a begin element and not its end, i.e. it is not well formed, then an XML parse of that verse will fail. OSIS does not require that a verse be well-formed. Does Sword in making a module from OSIS ensure that each verse is well formed?
If not, then how should it be handled?
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