[osis-core] paragraph break defended once again.

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Steve,
	I realize in all the verbosity of traffic on this topic, it was easy to 
miss my real problem.

	Lockman's data does not mark both beginning and end of a paragraph. 
They only have a <PM> Paragraph Break marker.

	Chris has recanted in a subtle way his position in his last email by 
stating that Matthew 9:1 probably does go with with preceding paragraph 
at the end of chapter 8 (I still argue that he's wrong about the first 
part of the NASB translation of Rev 13:1 being its own paragraph, but I 
don't need 2 cases of point).  This validates my concern that I CANNOT 
encode their paragraph boundaries as containers without making SCRIBAL 
decisions on their text.
	a) I don't have the time to read through their Bible and decide where I 
think paragraphs span chapters, and where they intend for a new 
paragraph to start at a chapter break.

	b) MOST IMPORTANTLY: I don't want to continue a tradition in 2000 years 
of scribal error because I usurp the role of modifying the text!  It is 
not my place to lay my interpretations on the text.  There have been 
commitees made of men so far beyond my ability to make such decisions as 
to warrant interplanetary distances.  I am not qualified, and resent the 
scribes in the past who felt they were, to 'correct', 'make more plain', 
or just plain change the text which they were assigned.


All this to say: damned be OSIS if it forces me to vitiate my text.  If 
it does not provide the mechanisms necessary for me to faithfully 
tranfer the data given me, then there is no question at all in my mind. 
  I would rather use non-recognized OSIS markup than compromise the 
integrity of the data entrusted me.





Steven J. DeRose wrote:
> I've read through this thread, and I'm not convinced yet that there's a 
> real need.
> 
> If you're inserting markup to represent a paragraph "break", it seems 
> that you must have made the interpretive decision (justified or not) 
> that there is a paragraph around there *to* break. In which case,
> marking that paragraph seems to me no more controversial than marking 
> it's "break".
> 
> I can imagine some peripheral cases where this might not hold, but I 
> also think I see practical problems that I think outweigh those:
> 
> * Two ways will confuse people.
> 
> * If you give people two ways, many will move toward the one that 
> requires less thought, even if they know there are good reasons to do 
> the other -- everybody's in a hurry, but I want to discourage people 
> from delivering a "real" text with markup they choose because they were 
> in a hurry. I think if we let paragraph breaks in the door, we'll see 
> few paragraph containers, and that practice will not gradually go away, 
> because it's too easy *in the moment* to do it the less useful way.
> 
> * Those paragraphs indiicated by markers would not be processable easily 
> by current software. For example, you couldn't translate them via XSLT, 
> or associate style info with them via XSL or CSS, or retrieve them with 
> various markup-aware tools.  This is especially nasty since there also 
> won't be any error reported -- just silent misbehavior that might get 
> caught by a very careful proofreader later. I think this is what lawyers 
> call an "attractive nuisance" -- very tempting to fall into, like an 
> unfenced swimming pool.
> 
> I could make the same argument for elminiating all the current "break" 
> milestones, but I don't think it would have anywhere near the force. For 
> example, querying based on whether two things occur in the same page or 
> column is way less valuable (frequent) than in the same paragraph; and 
> formatting that occurs merely because you're in a column or line seems 
> unlikely.
> 
> I think Troy has raised a really good and legitimate issue here, and it 
> deserves thorough discussion. At the same time, I'm not convinced the 
> benefits would outweigh the costs.
> 
> S
> _______________________________________________
> osis-core mailing list
> osis-core@bibletechnologieswg.org
> http://www.bibletechnologieswg.org/mailman/listinfo/osis-core