[tei-council] FAND strikes

[Alejandro Bia]

Changing numbered divs to un-numbered divs is a very easy transformation 
(by means of XSLT, or even some Find&Replace macro).

Nowadays, markup is no longer written by hand (I hope), and hence, not so 
dependent on hints like div numbers. With modern editors, tags are chosen 
from a DTD-guided menu (as in XMetaL). With features like on-screen tag 
collapsing, or tree-structure views, which modern editors have nowadays, 
the nesting and number of divs can be easily seen and controlled, even 
without the numbers. The advantages of numbered divs were more 
user-oriented than process-related, so they may not be missed so much now 
by encoders.

There will be complaints anyway. Call it human nature...

The only practical automatism that I can think of is limiting the number of 
nested divs at a DTD level, which could be easily done with the numbered 
divs. However, an XSLT script can easily perform this type of additional 
validation, if required.

I think it may be time now to get rid of numbered divs, which is an 
important simplification to TEI. With this, the problem of whether the 
highest level division should be a div0 or a div1 would also disappear.

Eliminating divs would also improve document exchange.

XML itself appeared as a simplification to SGML. Them we could experience 
that a more constrained environment (XML) was both easier to use and better 
for processing purposes. In this case, reducing the options to only 
un-numbered divs may have the same beneficial effect.

  higher constraints = higher predictability = easier programming

This type of simplifications are usually good...

Alex.-

At 15:59 04/02/2006, Lou's Laptop wrote:

>Agents of the Front for Abolition of Numbered Divs have brain-washed me 
>into believing that the P5-conformant version of TEI Lite I am currently 
>working on should make no reference to numbered divs.
>
>How much of a ruckus do we think this little revision might cause?
>
>
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ALEJANDRO BIA
e-mail: abia at umh.es

   Departamento de Estadística, Matemática e Informática
   Centro de Investigación Operativa
   Universidad Miguel Hernández
   Edificio Torretamarit
   Avenida de la Universidad s/n, E-03202, Elche, ESPAÑA
   http://www.umh.es/
   Tel: +34 966658542
   Fax: +34 966658715
   Teléfono móvil: +34 610806427

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