I have 3 requests. Standards. Standards. Standards. Standards. oops that was
4. :) IMNSHO we should go with XHTML/CSS and separate the semantic
structural markup from the display style.
http://www.webstandards.org/
First of all, there are STANDARD for HOW we implement these ui features based on in the web interface- as you mentioned- character code standard, w3c standard, RFC, Internet draft, etc.
However, there are NO standard about WHAT we are going to implement in the User Interface. For example, there are no standard to say we should have a UI to select a book or not There are no standard to say we should display a strong number in everywhere or only in some where. Those are UI features.
Also, even with a fixed set of UI features and based on standard, there are no STANDARD to say how you connect these two together. For exmple, by giving a particulare UI feature and based on w3c standard, there are many different way to implement it. For example, how to select a book from the Bible, you can have a page of 66 <A HREF> flat displyed there or you can choose to display it as menu. If you display it as menu, you can choose to use html <SELECT> or use _javascript_ throguht DOM to generated DIV with CSS to form the menu. Go to the next level, if we want people to select a particular chapter from a particulare book, say Gen. You can show two menu in <SELECT> without any connection- which make illegal book/chapter selection possible- for example Ruth chapter 13 - which does not exist. Or you can sync them together with JavsScript (try the http://people.netscape.com/ftang/BIBLE if you know Chinese) or you can simply let people typed in both book name and chapter name in a text field and then parse it.
The UI issue is very interesting topic. And you can always find a good and better way to implement it. Also, standards are a moving set of documentation. For example, in 1995 XML is not a standard yet (it is published in 1998, right? ) but today it is a standard. Something which are not standard may become standard. (for example, the work in the CSS3 workind drafts.) Sometimes those standard are adopted quite quickly, sometimes they never got adopted.
Therefore, if you want to talk about standard, you really need to DEFINE the set of standards you are talking about.
And, beside w3c standards, there are international standard (by ISO), national standard (by ANSI, JIS, etc), de factor standard (what every one use- for example, use English Bible Book Abbreviation GEN instead of Hebrew/Greek abbreviation as Book selection id), platform standard (which font names all the Widnows/MacOS/Linux ship as standard support for the platform and work good with the text that we want to display) you need to worry about.
