There’s been some good progress on bibleref, and i’ve made corresponding updates (finally!) to the bibleref pages on SemanticBible: the overview is still the best starting place. There are some new blogging tools, and a validation/processor page where you can check your markup. I’ve also tried to state more precisely what processors should return when they find bibleref markup. The resulting grammar looks a little daunting (and those of you who understand this stuff should check if i’ve got it right): i probably thought too hard about weird cases that aren’t likely to occur often or ever. Maintaining the balance between making it as easy as possible for people to use, but being both precise and flexible enough, is a challenge.

I’d welcome further comments on the discussion forum: there’s a new topic for this version of the specification. I found the discussion format really helpful for the last round: Chris Roberts in particular helped me not go off the deep end on several points, and having an implementation really makes the discussion concrete.

After i’ve collected and digested comments on this draft, i’ll start button-holing some well-known bibliobloggers to see who i can persuade to adopt bibleref (Rico, you’re in my crosshairs). This should also help broaden the feedback in case there are still wrinkles to iron out.

By the way, “Creating Standards is Altruistic” by Leo Sauermann on Planet RDF is a great piece about why people do the hard work of standards creation. As Christians, we are called to serve others: developing IT and web standards is not exactly the traditional way we think about that, but it’s a valid perspective, and one reason i’m interested in advocating for bibleref. I really think Christians using the web will be better served if it’s easier for them to find Bible-related information.