On Dec 20, 2007 12:11 AM, Eeli Kaikkonen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, DM Smith wrote: > > I see them as the same thing from an implementation level. The > > application is free to use the mechanism in various ways: Bookmarks, > > Topic lists, saved state, ..... How the application presents them to > > the user gives the appearance of transience or permanence. > > The engine and api would define the "syntax" (implemantation) but the > user interface gives the "semantics". For semantics we must have a > standard, otherwise we will have the same situation as with the Personal > Commentary. It has syntax (technical implementation) but no semantics > (which markup to use). > > For app specific lists their is no need for standards but if we are > talking about interchangeable bookmarks they are necessary. For example: > > What encoding should be used for headers/comments? If I had my will done > we would use only utf8 (as you probably could guess :). Otherwise it has > to be given with each piece of text separately because it cannot be > guaranteed that different frontends which edit the same bookmark list > use the same encoding.
A good point that hadn't occurred to me (I'm still very much an ASCII man). For Sword, UTF-8 might end up best, but technically it is one of the worst formats possible. Its only redeeming feature is that it allows existing 7-bit ASCII to work unchanged. For the rest, I need to employ special parsing techniques to ensure that it is parsed correctly. I prefer 16-bit character unicode, since it is a very simple and direct representation at the level of intent, which still allows my array accesses to work correctly and so on. > How are headers/topic texts/comments used? How long can they be? If one > frontend accepts one km long text and another one accepts one line of > 255 characters there will be problems. I would think it is possible at present to define the complete set of attributes supported by verse lists (though length may be an issue). > Is any markup allowed in texts? Which one? I view the description and comments as simple plain-text comments, and so do not see the need for markup. > Is one bookmark one verse, one verse range, several verse ranges? (This > can actually be a technical implementation question.) As said just before, I think the verse range is the most compelling one (though this gets more interesting if we want to deal with more than just Bible references). > Which data fields should be used with bookmarks? Are there any fields > which are implemented in techical level but should not be used with > bookmarks? (For example, if one fronted accepts comments and the end > user writes comments for individual verses which are important to him > and then moves the bookmarks to another app, he looses the comments > if another app thinks that bookmarks should not have comments.) I don't see this as a problem. So long as Sword defines the attributes that the thing can have, no information will be physically lost. If applications choose to display a subset of the data available then that is probably a little unfortunate for the user, but it will not actually lose them data. Applications should be recommended to make the data available in some form, but I don't think it is required. Jon _______________________________________________ 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
