[sword-devel] OSIS recommendations to SIL/JAARS

[DM Smith]

On Jul 24, 2007, at 11:17 PM, Chris Little wrote:

>
>
> 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?

No there is not.

However, it seems to me that the purpose of milestoned container  
elements, such as <div>, <verse>, <chapter>, ... was to allow for two  
incompatible divisions of the material to co-exist. (BCV, book/ 
chapter/verse; and CSP, chapter/section/paragraph)

So if there were no BCV elements, then CSP container elements could  
be used for nearly the whole of the Bible. There will be notable  
exceptions. Quotes are an obvious one.

Likewise, if there were only BCV elements, they could be container  
elements.

I think, that if one were to markup the Bible twice, once in each  
way, and then try to merge the results, changing the elements of  
either one to containers that the result would be close to what I  
described. The milestoned elements would not overlap. (with the  
exceptions that had to be there in the first place.)

The only big question I see in the merging would be the placement of  
the milestone elements relative to the container elements. I think  
that if <a eID="xxx"></b> is not semantically different from </b><a  
eID="xxx"> that it is desirable to reorder them so that the crossing  
of logical containers is minimized. Same goes with <a sID="xxx"><b>.  
But it is not necessary.


>
> 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.

These are what I mean by notable exceptions.

  -- DM