[sword-devel] Sword enhancement proposal [was: HTML filter cross references link]

[Manfred Bergmann]

Am 29.07.2008 um 09:10 schrieb Chris Little:

>
>
> Greg Hellings wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 1:45 AM, Manfred Bergmann  
>> <bergmannmd at web.de> wrote:
>>> Although I don't understand right now how the Sword module data is  
>>> stored,
>>> my proposal here is that Sword should have a simple intermediate  
>>> XML format
>>> that can be used by API users to have full access to the module  
>>> data.
>>> Simple HTML/RTF can still be produced from this intermediate  
>>> format by
>>> Sword. But HTML should not be used to give access to the module  
>>> data while
>>> at the same time raw data access should not be used.
>>> Having XSDs would make is easy for API-users to use XML->Object  
>>> binding (I
>>> only know JAXB in Java but this might be available to most  
>>> languages as it
>>> is used in protocols like SOAP).
>>> Also XSLT stylesheets can be used to produce HTML or whatever  
>>> output.
>>> Frontends could choose to use the HTML rendered output or choose  
>>> totally
>>> different approaches by using the data of the intermediate XML.
>>> Let me know what you think.
>>
>> It seems to me that this is one of the better ideas.  After all, the
>> library should supply display-agnostic data to the front end, which
>> then renders it into a display format, rather than presenting it with
>> a list of a few preselected display formats which are supported at  
>> the
>> engine level.
>
> If you want OSIS, just ask the engine for OSIS. There's no requirement
> that you tell the API to render text as HTML or RTF. You can just as
> easily tell the API to render to OSIS, and it will happily perform (or
> at least attempt) the conversion from GBF and ThML to OSIS. The  
> GBFOSIS
> and ThMLOSIS filters might need a little more work, but they should
> already work fairly well.

So that means, basically, there is something like intermediate XML  
produced on the fly.
Does that work for dictionaries, too?


Manfred