A note, Tom: Taking Michael Johnson's word and accepting his opinion on
OSIS is a bit like taking Bill Gates' word on the future of Linux.
They're both on record as being opposed to the respective products that
they criticize.
Basically, OSIS is the only acceptable format for future Sword modules.
Anything submitted in another format will have to be converted to OSIS
by one of us (which will cause delays in release). Sword officially
supports the full OSIS standard. Our software does not necessarily
currently implement special behaviors for every tag, but for the most
part every tag that needs to be handled already is. (For example, we do
nothing with the <name> tag. Certainly it is imaginable that we could do
something with it like highlight or hyperlink names, but currently there
aren't any modules using this tag that I'm aware of. And our importers
do PRESERVE this information, so adding support does not require redoing
the module or reimporting--just some backend work on the
library/frontends.)
OSIS is possibly most useful and beneficial as an archival format. It is
a sufficiently rich encoding system that it can probably handle encoding
anything in your Bible. Once it is in OSIS, you can fairly easily write
XSL transforms to convert the OSIS text to another format if that is
your need.
As for STEP (I'm not sure why this was brought up), it has a decreasing
number of supporting applications. Some of its supporters have ceased
using STEP; others have simply gone out of business. And as Michael
mentions, it has no steering committee at the moment, which makes its
future rather bleak. But STEP really has a different objective from
OSIS. They serve fairly different needs.
--Chris
Kahunapule Michael Johnson wrote:
The future is hard to predict. Currently, OSIS (or rather a subset of
OSIS) is used by The Sword Project as one option for Scripture text
import. An improper subset of OSIS is being considered for use by a
couple of programs within SIL, in parallel with USFM. I wrote a program
that generates OSIS from GBF, but it should probably be either updated
after the next round of changes to OSIS get officially published. That
is something I don't see much benefit in doing, though, so it is pretty
low on the priority list. I think STEP may be in wider use than OSIS,
but STEP seems to have a lack of a steering committee at the moment, and
the mirror of the STEP information that was on crosswire.org seems to
have disappeared.
Since you enjoy growing in patience and perseverance so much, OSIS may
be just right for you... just don't get mad if you find that OSIS isn't
widely supported after you encode a Bible in it, and that nobody
supports all features of the full OSIS specification in OSIS readers.
Things may look different tomorrow...
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