[sword-devel] WEB update request

[DM Smith]

I'll give my 2 cents regarding quotation markup. I have over 14 years of 
experience in Electronic Publishing. So my comments come from 
professional experience in non-theological works.

1) The language of a document may differ from the language of the 
reader. The text of the document needs to be preserved in the language 
of the document.

2) Text should not be buried as an attribute of an element, but may be 
repeated there. This allows for text to be presented w/o using the 
markup for presentation. That is, just dumping all the text elements in 
the order they appear.
<date calendar="Gregorian" year="2004" month="2" day="5">5-2-04</date>
<money unit="talent">5</money>

3) Markup can be used as an assist to help a reader understand data in 
the text. It can also be used as an assist to help software understand 
content.

4) The intellectual property (IP) of a writer may include document 
presentation. There need to be markup to preserve IP. If this is not 
done in OSIS, then OSIS cannot be used as an authoring markup and the 
editorial master of a document will not be kept in OSIS.

With regard to quotation marks:
These are language elements not merely typographical presentation 
elements. They frequently differ from language to language and 
frequently the begin quote and the end quote are different. Some 
languages have more than one type of quote and may have complex rules as 
to when to use them. But when it comes down to it, writers often ignore 
rules and use whatever marks they wish.

Quotation marks may be IP elements. A writer may use them to indicate 
different kinds of information. While not religious works, we have all 
seen books that explain typographic elements at the beginning of a book. 
Things like bold, italic, font styling, boxing. I have seen explanations 
of double quotes, « », ' ', „ ”, ...

Quotation marks do not always come in pairs and can span other container 
elements. Example is Jeremiah 42:7-22 in NIV. Verse 9 begins a quote 
that continues to the end of the chapter. Verse 10-12 are a quote w/in a 
quote. Verses 7, 13, and 19 begin paragraphs. Verses 13 and 19 begin 
with unpaired quotation marks. (There is a lot more going on here wrt 
quotes, but this is enough to present an example).

I would suggest markup like one of these
(Chevrons are used for quotes):
a) <q sID="x">«</q>Quoted text<q eID="x">»</q>
By adding the mark to the milestone, it extends the OSIS. However, I 
think that this is not good as it changes the meaning of a milestone 
element to a container element, even if it is just text. And this does 
not handle unpaired quotation marks.

b) <q marked="true">«Quoted Text»</q>
An attribute value is needed to distinguish from the current standard.
While this is simple, it does not handle unpaired quotation marks.

c) <q><qm>«</qm>Quoted Text<qm>»</qm></q>
A separate element preserves the current definition of OSIS and allows 
for <q> w/o <qm> as children or adjacent siblings to be treated as they 
are today. XSLT can be used to ignore <qm> and the results will be as in 
the standard today, i.e. text w/o quotation marks.