Frequently Asked Questions
1. Using Bibleref
1.1. It's clear enough that 2Tim 2:15 is a Bible reference: why not just parse the text directly, rather than adding bibleref markup requirements?
While there are many easy cases, there are enough hard ones to justify one additional piece of information to identify references. Using bibleref also makes it possible to annotate implicit references that would otherwise be unparseable.
1.2. My text is already hyperlinked to a well-known Bible site: why do i also have to specify that it's a Bible reference?
There are far too many sites with Bible texts to be able to build automated systems that figure this out, and the list of them changes constantly. Using bibleref today means your Bible references will be clearly identifiable tomorrow, even if the site you linked to isn't around anymore.
2. Standards
2.1. I'm accustomed to using my own abbreviations for books of the Bible. Does bibleref require me to use specific abbreviations or formatting conventions?
No: any reasonably standard identifiers and formats (like those that would be accepted in a Bible search interface on the web) should be fine. As long as you've identified text as a Bible reference, the burden should be on the machine processing that text to determine the reference.
2.2. I blog in (Swedish/Swahili/Swati/some other language): do i have to use English identifiers for book names?
No: provided the content of your page is identified using the HTML or XML lang attribute, it's the processor's job to recognize the appropriate set of identifiers for that language.
3. Promoting the Bibleref Standard
3.1. How will you convince everyone to use this standard?
Convincing everyone is too ambitious, but i'm optimistic that leading bloggers may adopt bibleref once they understand the value. I also hope to encourage others to develop tools to make it easy or transparent to incorporate bibleref into their websites.
4. Technical Approach
4.1. Is there a plugin for WordPress?
Chris Roberts has incorporated bibleref into his WordPress ESV Plugin, as of version 3.1.0. The Holy Scripturizer is another WordPress plugin that uses bibleref.