[osis-core] lang inheritance....

[Steven J. DeRose]

Sorry I've been pretty absent on the list. But let me throw a small 
wrench into the works to think about:

Writing this indexer, I'm trying to get it to track xml:lang values. 
This works trivially for the normal element tree (well, after I add a 
couple lines of code it will). *But* -- how, exactly, is the language 
value affected by Trojan milestone elements?

Since XML defines the inheritance of xml:lang in terms of element 
containment, the value doesn't inherit onto the content of a 
milestone-delimited element. This is a potential problem. We could 
easily state that OSIS applications are also supposed to inherit lang 
through milestone-delimited elements, but I don't see any way to 
specify the real meaning of that unambiguously. If you've got several 
phenomena overlapping, just whose "lang" is in effect at any given 
time?

The Occam's razor solution (or perhaps, less virtuously, the Gordium 
knot solution), is to prohibit xml:lang on milestoned elements. Not 
so bad for chapter/verse, but could be real bad for multiply nested 
quotations....

S
-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.derose.net
Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
Email: sderose@acm.org  or  steve@derose.net