Marjorie Burghart wrote:
Dear DMs,
Maybe this should be better posted on the TEI list, but I hope some of you could have interesting experience in the field !
Well, there is a fair degree of overlap between the TEI list and DM, so I'm sure some more qualified people will wade in...
Perhaps some of the members of the Overlap SIG which has a summary of some of the major ways of dealing with overlap on the TEI Wiki...
http://www.tei-c.org/wiki/index.php/SIG:Overlap
I'm encoding an ongoing project in TEI XML, and I'm encountering problems to represent concurrent hierarchies. I'd like to markup some rhetorical elements, that can either be contained in paragraphes (<p> tags), or contain <p> tags, depending on their length and importance. Therefore, I can't use <seg>, for instance. From a "logical" point of view, it seems to me that <div> tags would be perfect (with a convenient type), but in this case I would have a problem of concurrent hierarchies (possible overlapping of <div> and <p> elements).
This is the normal kind of problem people have with XML. However, although there are technical solutions to represent both hierarchies, I've always found it easiest to simply compromise and mark up the structure of one of them as dominant. (Usually for me this means marking page/folio breaks as milestones.) This is the milestone method mentioned in chapter 31 of the guidelines.
The solutions proposed in the current TEI Guidelines for the handling of multiple hierarchies would work, BUT I'm afraid they would fairly complicate the processing of the encoded texts with standard XML tools.
They do. If the methods of avoiding choosing one hierarchy over the other is unacceptably complex, then I don't see many options. Personaly I'd just milestone one of them, or use the fragmentation method based on the @part attribute.
I thought about customizing the DTD to make <p> tags empty, which would be convenient for my purpose, but the markup wouldn't be TEI compliant any more (as CDATA is not allowed as child of div or body)... In a way, it seems to be the problem too for, eg, the quite seducing HORSE approach recently discussed by S. Bauman reguarding TEI (http://www.mulberrytech.com/Extreme/Proceedings/html/2005/Bauman01/EML2005Ba...)
I believe a variant on the HORSE/CLIX is quite likely to appear in the P5 guidelines.
-James