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 !
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).
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.
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...) ?
Thanks in advance for your help and experience (especially concerning the efficiency of processing the marked texts) !
Marjorie