[osis-core] Eliminate quote and blockQuote as elements and put back quote milestones.

Todd Tillinghast osis-core@bibletechnologieswg.org
Wed, 5 Jun 2002 14:18:58 -0500


If the proposal for a "role" to contain "actual" scripture text is
accepted most of the overlapping hierarchies are simply handled.   (The
proposal will eliminate the high occurrence of overlapping between
<verse> and <lineGroup>/<line> and <list>/<item> when <lineGroup>/<line>
and <list>/<item> are used.)

Quotes and block quotes seem to OFTEN overlap with other hierarchies.
If they alone were represented as milestones the occurrence of
overlapping hierarchies would be largely limited to a few occurrences of
paragraphs and verses overlapping (71 cases of paragraphs and verses
overlapping in the TEV version of Matthew out of a total of 461
paragraphs or 15% of paragraphs).  

The original argument of eliminating milestones to handle overlapping
hierarchies was because the occurrence was infrequent.  

If the occurrence is frequent more than 50% then it would seem the
milestone approach would be more appropriate.  The other positive factor
for quotes is that the handling of them as milestones is simpler that
with other milestone types.  If an attribute for quote level and one for
quote type were added to <qStart> and <qEnd> elements then it would be
fairly simple to look forward and backward for the matching quote and to
determine what to do when rendering based on the level and type
attribute alone.  (The type attribute would eliminate the need for both
blockQuote and q.  Still waiting on clarification on the difference
between those two.)

However, I think we should EITHER milestones OR elements for quote and
blockQuote. 

I think that quotes as milestones will make encoding easier as well.

Thoughts?

Todd