I’m glad you’ve found bibleref helpful. While i can’t claim it’s achieved the status of a “standard”, i feel like every step toward more regularity is a good one.

As to using title to show the full text: example 3A on the Bibleref Examples page shows another alternative. Given an outer cite tag and an inner anchor tag, most browsers will take the title from the inner one: so that would give you both standard bibleref as well as text in the tooltip. For pop-ups, you might look at Logos’ Reftagger, which gives you lots of tooltip options (and also respects bibleref markup).

I certainly don’t see anything wrong with using full book names: any parsing scheme that recognizes the usual abbreviations should be able to recognize them as well.

Thanks for sharing your site!
Sean

Just want to let you know that I read this post and the related ones about 1.5 years ago and they helped me to basically consolidate what I was thinking anyway with using the cite tag. When building the Christian Assemblies website I had another class in mind but we opted to go for the “bibleref” class in the name of standardisation. Check the site out for a fairly intensive example of use of the microformat! We have 10 languages and it’s working pretty well for us so I don’t think the internationalisation issues are a problem.

There’s only one thing where we’ve broken the standard – we fill the title attribute with the full verse text. This is needed so that we can produce the cool pop-ups with the full text when you hover your mouse over a scripture reference. But if you check the code you’ll see that we at least start with the reference.

Additionally we use the full book names since the site is aimed largely at non-Christians and we want them to understand what we are talking about! We also use [q class="bibletxt"] to mark up our actual scripture text. Perhaps this will become the next standard??

I think it’s a good microformat.

Regards,
John

Sean, if you think there would be interest, I could write a pretty simple plugin for WordPress that would only do the microformat, and only when a visitor visits the page. This would be for users who might be interested in an automatic microformat but don’t want everything contained in the ESV plugin. If the microformat method ever changes a user would only have to upgrade their plugin and, since the plugin would execute at runtime and wouldn’t change the post itself, all references would use the updated microformat.

Just let me know, a plugin like that would be pretty simple to write.

As far as my plugin goes, there is one problem with the title tag that I am still mulling over. The plugin has the option of displaying the Bible text in a tooltip. If I use the title attribute in a link, many browsers will display that as a small tooltip and it will be displayed on top of the Bible passage tooltip. There is no guarantee that the link text will be the Bible reference, so leaving out the title isn’t really helpful.

What I will likely do is to have the cite tag prior to the link and have it contain a style attribute with display:none; so that the bibleref will be present with the actual Bible reference without interfering any with the plugin.

I will do something similar for instances when a user uses the plugin to display Bible text inline but doesn’t want to display the reference: I’ll have a cite tag, but with display: hidden.

How does that sound?

The mention of search engines made me think, have you “spoken” to people like Ehud Ben Zvi at JHS, at some stage getting such people on board would be helpful…