[sword-devel] USFM end marker clarification

[Chris Little]

On 08/13/2012 11:09 PM, David Haslam wrote:
> The relevant paragraph is,
>
> "In USFM, character level markup can be nested (embedded) within a paragraph
> element, or another character element, but (depending on the way in which
> the markers are written) does not necessarily cancel out the previous
> marker's attributes. Paratext (a UBS translation editor) is not capable of
> rendering all of the display variations that would be implied due to
> nesting."

It's not relevant to note- or cross-reference-internal markup. In those 
cases, the reference is explicit that "Paratext  ... will interpret the 
presence of a new marker as an implicit closure of any preceding 
character  level marker."

I can't really conceive how such a dramatic change to USFM is considered 
acceptable. And the imprecise hedges like 'not necessarily' in the 
quoted paragraph are not terribly reassuring about USFM's reliability as 
an archival format. The interpretation of a document encoded in USFM 
prior to this change in the reference may have been altered by the 
change in the reference, without any action on the part of the encoder.

FWIW, USX explicitly does not permit nesting of character level markup 
(<char>). One could encode everything with milestone elements instead of 
containers, but the fact the USX schema could easily allow <char> 
nesting but doesn't indicates to me that implicit nesting is not an 
intended interpretation.

--Chris