Why does the issue of digital Bible standards have so much urgency?
Once a technology is well understood, rapid development and adoption of standards is important because it vastly reduces the costs of advancement in the field. One very clear example is the US choice of Imperial vs. Metric measurements. The US signed the Treaty of the Meter in 1875, but even this was too late: so much technology was built in the old ways, that Congress felt it too expensive to change over completely; because of this we have 2 systems for everything today. With computers, standardization if even more important because there is often no easy conversion from one standard to another, such as multiplying liters to get gallons. The longer each Bible software vendor, translator, and publisher uses a different format, the harder it is to build simple, interoperable software, and documents that do not die with the particular program they were published in.
