[osis-core] Placement of <note>s

[Harry Plantinga]

A comment about where to put <note> and other text.
XMetaL (and other XML editors, I suspect) edit in a CSS
view of a document. Yes, you can preview in an XSLT view, 
but actual editing is done in a CSS view. 

Since CSS can't rearrange text, the order in which the 
text occurs in a document is the order in which it 
appears in your editor window.  So the text of a note
will appear in the middle of a paragraph if the note
is placed in the middle of the paragraph.  It makes
for an editing environment that requires that you understand
the underlying XML and can overlook a note inserted right
into the middle of a sentence.

User friendly editing programs have to be able to move the
element to a more appropriate place, e.g. the bottom of
the page.  Support for moving footnotes is normally built
into word processors, but moving other text is difficult.

So, notes could appear in-line for editing with a word
processor such as Writer, but in-line notes make editing
more difficult in an XML editor. In other cases, text
should appear in presentation order as much as possible.

Allowing verse segments to appear out of order in a 
document would make the document much harder to edit or
require fancy editing software.

-Harry


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-osis-core@bibletechnologieswg.org
[mailto:owner-osis-core@bibletechnologieswg.org]On Behalf Of Patrick
Durusau
Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2002 4:54 PM
To: osis-core
Subject: [osis-core] Element Review: <divineName>


<divineName> has only PCDATA and <note> (optional).

Should point out that the best practice is to always place the note 
inside the element to which it applies. (Largely arbitrary choice but it 
has to go somewhere and that at least puts it close to the item in 
question.)

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu