[osis-core] Milestone proposal

[Patrick Durusau]

Troy,

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
<snip>

> <verse osisID="John.1.1" mID="X"/>In the beginning...<verse mID="X"/>
>
>
> Todd brought up a good point before we left that we should discuss.
> He pointed out that if we have an excerpt of an OSIS doc that contains 
> the ending milestone, we won't be able to tell that it is an end 
> milestone, as opposed to a start milestone.
>
> I agreed with him in Dallas, but have thought about it and I'm not 
> sure now.
>
> If, indeed, milestone 'containers' should be treated exactly like real 
> XML containers, then the proposed problem case should be illegal anyway.  

Not illegal, just not meaningful. Note that treating matching milestones 
as a "container" is not the same as being a container for purposes of 
the XML tree syntax. If you have a missing "starting" milestone, you 
simply have an empty element that has little meaning. Software looking 
for matching empty elements would simply fail to find a match but not a 
syntax error.

> So, I'm not sure.  I don't mind either, really.  Todd's proposed 
> change would look something like:
>
> <verse osisID="John.1.1" mB="X"/>In the beginning...<verse mE="X"/>

Not sure what this buys us as opposed to your "mID." It does rely upon a 
notion of document order to be meaningful but since we are talking about 
static documents (at least at this stage) I don't see that as a weakness.

If we go with Todd's proposal, we introduce the need to use different 
attribute names for either end, which should still be occuring in 
document order. If I find a "mE" and value without an "mB" with a 
matching value it looks to me like the same situation as finding an 
"mID" and its value, without another "mID" with a matching value. There 
is still no control over the order of placement of the elements.

Since most overlap is localized, in other words, we are not talking 
about more than a screen full of text where the user will be entering 
the values, I would go with using the same attribute name to ease the 
work (and lessen possible errors) on the manual entry user.

See note soon to follow on my investigation into the schema.

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model