{"id":603,"date":"2007-05-24T00:05:54","date_gmt":"2007-05-24T04:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/05\/24\/annotating-scripture-references-in-blog-posts-a-modest-proposal\/"},"modified":"2007-05-24T00:09:14","modified_gmt":"2007-05-24T04:09:14","slug":"annotating-scripture-references-in-blog-posts-a-modest-proposal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/05\/24\/annotating-scripture-references-in-blog-posts-a-modest-proposal\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotating Scripture References in Blog Posts: a Modest Proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lots of people write blog posts that contain references to the Hebrew or Christian Bible (henceforth I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll simply say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bible\u00e2\u20ac\u009d). I&#8217;d like to propose that blog authors adopt a few very simple conventions that, in the spirit of <a href=\"http:\/\/microformats.org\">microformats<\/a>, would add semantic richness and extended value to these posts without requiring fancy new languages or a lot of author overhead. This seems like an ideal opportunity to add value, since<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>there are already longstanding and widespread conventions for representing these references textually (the principle of &#8220;adapt to current behaviors&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>the format requirements are quite simple (maybe this is more like a &#8220;nanoformat&#8221; than a microformat) (the principle of &#8220;as simple as possible&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Benefits:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You could more readily find other blog posts that are talking about passages you&#8217;re interested in<\/li>\n<li>Software agents could automatically insert hyperlinks to any of several publicly-available web sites with Bible texts like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\">Bible Gateway<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/esv.org\">ESV bible<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bible.org\/netbible\/\">NET Bible<\/a>, etc.<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;d have a source of data to tell us which passages are talked about most (or least)<\/li>\n<li>Unlike blog prose, such an approach could be language-independent (though this might require cross-language agreement on book names, or at least language indicators)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Approach:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Bible references have a simple structure, in the simplest case the three elements of book name, chapter, and (optionally) verse. Book names can either be spelled out, or use an abbreviated form like &#8220;Rev&#8221; for Revelation. There&#8217;s at least one existing standard for book names, embedded in the (300 page!) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sbl-site.org\/Publications\/PublishingWithSBL\/SBLHS.pdf\">SBL Manual of Style<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><em>Simple<\/em> references specify a given single text (at some level of granularity). <em>Range<\/em> references identify a contiguous span like John 3:1-20. <em>Compound<\/em> references combine one or both of these, e.g. Eph 1, 2:8-9. These are in order of decreasing importance: just starting with simple references would be a big step forward.<\/li>\n<li>An optional identifier for a specific version or translation (e.g. KJV for King James Version, ESV for English Standard Version, etc.) would be valuable, though it&#8217;s not essential.<\/li>\n<li>Perhaps the authors of plug-ins for popular blogging platforms (like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sixapart.com\/pronet\/plugins\/plugin\/scripturizer.html\">Scripturizer<\/a> for Typepad, or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.musterion.net\/wordpress-esv-plugin\/\">the ESV plugin for WordPress<\/a>) could be persuaded to include the microformat in their output: then users of those plug-ins wouldn&#8217;t even have to take any special steps.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Candidate Format<\/h3>\n<p>Use the abbr element from XHTML, with &#8220;bibleref&#8221; as the class attribute, and a normalized notation as the title attribute.<\/p>\n<p><textarea name=\"example\" cols=\"60\" rows=\"1\"><abbr class=\"bibleref\" title=\"John 3:16\">Jn 3:16<\/abbr><\/textarea><\/p>\n<p>This follows the spirit of the <a href=\"http:\/\/microformats.org\/wiki\/abbr-design-pattern\">abbr-design-pattern<\/a>, with human-friendly text and a machine-readable title attribute (so it doesn&#8217;t matter how the textual content is formatted, as long as the title is machine-parseable, or reasonably so). This could be extended with something like class=&#8221;biblerefrange&#8221; for range references like Eph 2:8-9. While we could try to forge agreement on how to format the title attribute, in practice it won&#8217;t matter except for very obscure cases. Simply indicating that it&#8217;s a bible reference will be enough to render 99% of the cases fully parseable (assuming the book and chapter are indicated: a reference to &#8220;3:16&#8221;, in the context of a discussion of John&#8217;s Gospel, wouldn&#8217;t work).<\/p>\n<h3>See Also<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/microformats.org\/discuss\/mail\/microformats-discuss\/2005-December\/002187.html\">  This thread<\/a> at microformats.org raised the question a year and a half ago, but i see no evidence it was ever resolved.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/tantek.com\/presentations\/2005\/03\/elementsofxhtml\/\">The Elements of Meaningful XHTML<\/a>, by Tantek Celik, Senior Technologist at Technorati<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lots of people write blog posts that contain references to the Hebrew or Christian Bible (henceforth I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll simply say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bible\u00e2\u20ac\u009d). I&#8217;d like to propose that blog authors adopt a few very simple conventions that, in the spirit of microformats, would add semantic richness and extended value to these posts without requiring fancy new languages or &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/05\/24\/annotating-scripture-references-in-blog-posts-a-modest-proposal\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Annotating Scripture References in Blog Posts: a Modest Proposal<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}