[osis-core] Placement of <note>s

[Patrick Durusau]

Harry,

Just a quick note on placement of notes.

I understand the difficulty of editing when notes appear "inline" in the 
text but I am not sure if there is an easy solution to that problem. 
Traditionally, notes have been inserted "inline" in the markup and 
proper rendering is the task of the presentation software. I suppose it 
would also be possible to have the content model allow (require?) notes 
to appear at the end of the document instance but then the user would 
have to construct XLinks to show the proper insertion point in the text 
and assuming we wanted to have visual cues for the person editing, we 
would need some sort of inline marker to which the note would point. 
(The inline marker not being required by XML, since it can reconstruct 
the visual cue for the reader based upon the XLink held elsewhere.)

Not sure we can address this problem adequately but would be interested 
in any suggestions for any possible solution.

Patrick


Harry Plantinga wrote:

>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