[sword-devel] OSIS recommendations to SIL/JAARS

[Chris Little]

Kahunapule Michael Johnson wrote:
> DM Smith wrote:
>> When using milestoned elements it is easy to produce valid but poor  
>> OSIS with respect to overlapping elements. When considering just the  
>> milestoned sID/eID pairs, they should not overlap as in:
>> <div sID="xxx"/>....<q sID="aaa"/>.....<div eID="xxx"/>....<q  
>> eID="aaa"/>
>>   
> I thought the whole point of milestoned elements was to allow them to
> overlap! :-)
> Technically you could make verses overlap each other, too... but I can't
> think of any good reason to do that. I'm not sure why you might overlap
> div and q like your example in real text, unless the div and q started
> or ended at the same point, and someone chose to write them out in
> random order. A really good OSIS reader wouldn't care. Putting those
> sorts of things on the same stack in the writer implementation should
> take care of that bit of aesthetics.

There isn't an actual rule in OSIS against overlapping milestoned 
elements like in that example, is there?

Div and seg elements can be used for so many functions that there is a 
very real probability that the example above would need to be encoded. 
Overlapping markup of the sort above is important for marking various 
hierarchies in a single document.

You've got linguistic levels (word, clause, sentence, paragraph, etc.), 
often, but not always matching up with quotations. Then there's the 
book/chapter/verse hierarchy, which may or may not match up with that. 
You may want to markup elements such as authorship attribution or 
remarks on the questionable legibility of a particular string of papyrus 
text. And so forth....

So a good use of the above markup would be when you have some quotation 
(aaa) written on a papyrus, but a portion of the text (xxx), 
incorporating the start of the quotation, is only partly legible. Or 
maybe xxx appears to have been written by a different author from the 
rest of the text or is in a different hand from the rest of the manuscript.

--Chris