[sword-devel] Tagging verses and verse lists

[DM Smith]

A bit off topic....

On Dec 3, 2007, at 6:41 AM, Jonathan Morgan wrote:

> A few additional points about verse lists, thanks to Ben:
> 1. BibleDesktop does support saving of verse lists, again in a fairly
> simple format.  It still doesn't really have good support for topics,
> multiple verse lists, and so on.

I think that BibleDesktop's Verse list (which also allows passages and  
uses *.lst for the extension) is weak.
It does allow restore from it. Beyond that, it is good for importing  
into a document via cut&paste. But I don't think that it is used much  
for that latter purpose.

I will be replacing it with a Bookmark facility. The key  
characteristics of a Bookmark is that it saves state of a single view  
of a module and the user can name it.
As such there are a few pieces of info that a verse list does not  
contain that a Bookmark needs to contain.
1: One should be able to Bookmark any module, thus the references can  
to be to any module. So in essence it becomes a key list.
2: A key list requires a module name (e.g. KJV) to reconstruct the data.
3: Since it may be reasonable to use a verse list against any Bible, a  
word list against any dictionary, .... it may be constructive to cache  
the category of the module.
4: An important part of the user experience is to restore state, so a  
Bookmark should hold the flags for the various view options (e.g. Show/ 
hide Strongs/Notes/Headings...)
5: BD is unique among the Sword applications in that it does not  
merely show chapters at a time, but also shows arbitrary passages  
(i.e. the user can do a search or multi-passage lookup) in the same  
view. In the case of a search, saving the search request instead of  
the list of verses (or along with the list of verses) would be needed.
6: Finally, the user should be able to name a Bookmark.

I'm probably going to implement this using XML to reduce brittleness.

Additionally, BD will formalize the notion of a Bookmark Set, which is  
a named set of Bookmarks.

We plan to use this Bookmark facility in various ways. If you are  
interested in the details you can take a look at: http://www.crosswire.org/bugs/browse/BD-59
Based on Jon's Tagging ideas, I'd add 6: Search Bookmarks - The  
ability to constrain a search to a Bookmark or Bookmark set.

I think this facility will provide a rudimentary Topic Tagging tool.

>
> 2. As well as Verse Lists, Sword for Windows also supports bookmarks
> in a tree view, which has more features (though I think its usability
> still leaves something to be desired).
>
> It appears that support for the rudimentary, simple verse lists in
> various Sword applications is much better than I had expected.
> However, I think that there is still considerable room for
> standardisation and adding of features.
>
> Jon
>
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