Here I’ve collected a few thoughts in general on the process going forward in Phase 3.

Phase three is about ensuring that the text flows well and matches the ideas presented in the commentary and Rashi. This will require a read-through and comparing the wording of the text to Rashi’s elucidation. I suspect this will not take much time.

Bringing in Maimonides will be more difficult as I am unsure how to approach the Mishneh Torah or even if such a work is useful in a Noachide bible.

What we're not doing now:

• Concordance
• Cross Reference
• Any other kind of commentary outside of condensing Rashi, the text of which is much longer than the text of the Bible itself (at least in Genesis).

There are some “check the wording for this passage later” notes left over from phase one that I have ignored. I'll have to go back and check them later. They will probably all be made after phase 3, but we shall see.

It seems there is a problem with layout in Dokuwiki. I want to present the information in pages and columns but this is not entirely possible on Dokuwiki. I do not want to write a custom database program for this bible. The idea struck me that if the documents were stored as marked up text, a web app could be sufficiently smart enough to search through and pull individual verses; as well, with a few special rules, headings and other extraneous information could be pulled from a verse’s surroundings. Thus, storing the Bible in document form is probably going to be the way forward. It also aids the editing process. I really do not want to create a custom editor and reader. Formatting would become a nightmare. I have heard of OSIS as an XML bible format but I think that it’s too complex and a homegrown solution is going to be easier to implement.

I have also been experimenting with collapsible sections in bootstrap; it seems that with a single button press we could have commentary pop up in a side column (or in-line with the text). However, weaving the commentary directly in-line with the text seems to work better with a database view. On the other hand, it may be best to simply load all of the document text at once and let the user select what is shown (and for this it would not matter if it was a database or smart-document format).

I began giving each Rashi verse it’s own section and title. This was probably a mistake. I don’t think such titles have a use; so I stopped doing this after about Genesis 30. In any case this underscores the need for a proper layout of the document, something Dokuwiki cannot directly provide. The project is therefore moving to www.noachide.ca/bible — yet, for the remainder of the project I think we will keep the main copy of the document on this wiki. The web app can read information from the dokuwiki for now, although I suspect we will inevitably have to use a text based or XML document format in the future. It may also be possible to extend this using Dokuwiki format, such as using footnotes¹⁾. A reader program could simply interpret this, or some other Doku or Creole markup and lay out the sections as I want them. I wonder if this could actually be done in Dokuwiki with some sort of layout or template, but I have not found an ideal solution to this yet…

I’ve experimented with a three column layout for Genesis 1, and as it is plain to see it doesn’t work well. Ideally this would work better if the comments could be displayed in a separate area and maybe only if the verse is selected. This is impossible with Dokuwiki, but possibly with some sort of smart-program interpreting a document (see other comments). I’ve moved in the direction of a database application but am now considering simply storing the Bible and separate commentary sections in documents, which will then be interpreted and laid-out by a reader front-end. The idea would be to use something like bootstrap to allow the commentary to be either interwoven with the text or to appear in a sidebar when a verse is selected.

Things are moving – for Genesis. Now it's almost time to set our sights on Exodus. Should we do a full tagging, concordance, cross-reference, etc. for Genesis first? (Of course! or it will never get done!) but it may be time to start laying tracks for Exodus.

You can view the information for Phase 1 and 2 if you're curious how this all got started:

• Phase 1 Overview
• Phase 2 Overview