[sword-devel] [osis-editors] Re: The death of OSIS?

[DM Smith]

I re-read the thread and it seems to be too argumentative. And the 
arguments seem to be stretching thin.

Let's try to come to closure on the issue at hand. There is a request 
for quotation marks to be allowed to be text elements (not just markup) 
and for the standard to be changed to allow for continuation quotes.

To both of these there are suggested markup changes.

What is the proper forum for requesting and making changes to the OSIS 
standard? I took a look at "The OSIS Website" at bibletechnologies.net 
and I did not find it? Is it the OSIS Portal at http://whi.wts.edu/OSIS?

I think this discussion should move to that forum, if this is not the place.

Is there a defined process to make a formal request for enhancement? 
(e.g. bugzilla) I suggest that this request be made formally.

Is there a document that describes the principles by which suggestions 
for change to OSIS are evaluated? I also did not find any "Guiding Lights".

If not I suggest that it be created.

I think that things like the following would be appropriate for such a 
document.

Let me reiterate *some* principles of an editorial master (a document 
that has all the markup necessary to produce a writer's published work, 
from which all derivations are created):
1) The language of a document may differ from the language of the 
reader. The text of the document needs to be preserved in the language 
of the document.

2) Text should not be buried as an attribute of an element, but may be 
repeated there. This allows for text to be presented w/o using the 
markup for presentation. That is, just dumping all the text elements in 
the order they appear.
<date calendar="Gregorian" year="2004" month="2" day="5">5-2-04</date>
<money unit="talent">5</money>

3) Markup can be used as an assist to help a reader understand data in 
the text. It can also be used as an assist to help software understand 
content.

4) The intellectual property (IP) of a writer may include document 
presentation. There need to be markup to preserve IP. If this is not 
done in OSIS, then OSIS cannot be used as an authoring markup and the 
editorial master of a document will not be kept in OSIS.

External to such a markup system, a publication will have "control data" 
that is external to the document by which the document will be 
transformed for publication. This will include things like XML, and 
sword's conf files (what I call a control table).

The simple point is that if OSIS is not a sufficient standard for an 
editorial master, then the OSIS document will be derivative.

I would like the OSIS standard to be able to be used as an editorial 
master for Bibles and theological works.