I think Peter's point is a very good one, though; in XML, one must prioritize one hierarchy over another where they overlap; if the conceptual structure is prioritized, the physical must be relegated to milestones.
I think there is a long-term solution to this. I think multiple markups can exist on the same text, as long as they're in "different dimensions"; it's hard to explain, but imagine the text as a string going through space, and the markups as planes radiating out from it. Each markup would have to be keyed to positions in the text, rather than embedded directly in it, so instead of tags inside text you'd have tags which know which character position they belong in. Then you could combine two hierarchies in the manner which best suits your current purpose. For example, you might have a physical and a conceptual markup both keyed into the same text; either markup could be rendered as needed, and they could be combined using algorithms which generated well-formed output, prioritizing either one or the other, and reducing the second to milestones or divided tags linked by idrefs. In a system like this, each markup "dimension" would be much simpler and easier to manage. There are two major difficulties, though; one is that if the text itself is changed, all the markup pointers need to be updated to reflect the shift in character positions, and the other is that the combinatorial algorithms may need to be quite sophisticated, especially if more than two markup dimensions were to be rendered simultaneously.
I'm sure someone must have thought of this before, though -- does anyone have references to proposals like this?
Cheers, Martin
At 09:20 AM 23/06/2004, you wrote:
Peter, darling, you are talking nonsense. If you want a system based on words, mark up the words and XSLT will cope very well. (Yes, people do it: cf the BNC and many others). Likewise, if you want a system in which physical hierarchies matter, reflect that in your markup system.
______________________________________ Martin Holmes University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre mholmes@uvic.ca martin@mholmes.com mholmes@halfbakedsoftware.com http://www.mholmes.com http://web.uvic.ca/hcmc/ http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com