I think it's a fair given that we'll be linking to scripture sources a lot here, both in Q&A and in chat discussions. BibleGateway is perhaps the most popular website for these references. It would be of great benefit to us, to have some sort of quick way to link verses from BibleGateway.
I'm not a web developer, so forgive me if my example method below seems a bit crude.
Example:
[bg Ver=NIV Book=Gen Ch=1 Verse=1-5]
Should turn into:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
It would be really great if this sort of feature could be added to both chat, and the Question/Answer posts.
For comment posts, it would be nice if the same code could be used to insert a link like this.
In [bg Ver=NIV Book=Gen Ch=1 Verse=1-5] the Bible tells of the first day of Creation.
Should turn into:
In Genesis 1:1-5 (NIV) the Bible tells of the first day of Creation.
EDIT to include input from @SimonGillbee
The box for quoted text should be limited in vertical space - that is, change to a vertically-scrollable section - when a citation reaches a certain height. This will aid in readability of posts with extremely long quotations.
EDIT to address some other issues raised in Answers/Comments
This feature is not meant to represent any endorsement of BibleGateway by this site, nor should it represent limitation in reference materials allowed on the site. It just happens that BibleGateway is the most widely-recognized and comprehensive online resource for scripture quotations.
The feature should not be limited to any one translation/version, hence my suggestion of a Ver
property in the [bg]
tag. This is something that should always be specified by the post author, regardless of whether we have this feature implemented or not. If this feature is implemented, it should be done in such a way that all versions available on BibleGateway are also available for quotation here.
Additionally, if anyone wishes to quote a translation/version/book that is not included in BibleGateway's library, they should absolutely be welcome to do so via manual entry - provided, of course, that they specify what translation/version/book they are citing. An online link to the source should of course not be mandatory, but would always be nice.
The shortcut to BibleGateway proposed here is only intended to be a convenient feature for what is sure to be a large majority of our users. If there's any other website that covers a larger amount of territory, or can even be used to supplement the gaps in BibleGateway's coverage, please do add them to this suggestion by edit or comment.
[bg Ver=NIV Book=Gen Ch=1 Verse=1-5]
to[Genesis 1:1-5 NIV]
(the last "word" within the square brackets will denote the version, the rest will be thrown into the search query) and the computer will parse it and give us:http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201:1-5&version=NIV
bg
prefix to denote a BibleGateway tag. e.g.: `[bg Genesis 1:1-5 NIV].bg
prefix to distinguish the tag from other, non-bible-quote-related tags.