[uf-new] proposed semantic HTML for Bible references

[Sean]

I've posted a proposal for POSH to identify reference to Bible passages. An
overview of the proposal is at
http://www.semanticbible.com/bibleref/bibleref-overview.html: the bottom
line is my suggestion to use a format like this:

  <!-- marked-up text can be parsed, so no further markup is required -->
  <cite class="bibleref">John 3:16</abbr>
  <!-- marked-up text can't be easily parsed, so the title attribute is used
to indicate the reference -->
  <a href=" http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%203:16"
class="bibleref" title="John 3:16">the third chapter of John's Gospel, verse
16</abbr>
  Etc.

I see there was a thread on this at
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-December/0021
87.html some time ago, but I don't see any resolution. I'd like to hear any
comments from the list before pushing this farther along.
This was spawned by some recent posts (see
http://mattdabbs.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/most-blogged-scriptures/)
where somebody was trying to estimate the number of blog posts on different
passages by string search (which, as you'd expect, only works imperfectly).

Given the thousands of blog posts referencing Bible verses, this seems like
a ripe area for some attempts to define a standard.

Sean
sean at semanticbible.com