[tei-council] FAND faces setback

[Conal Tuohy]

David J Birnbaum wrote:

> The preceding paragraph makes sense only if Council very strongly 
> believes that numbered divs are a Bad Idea. Should we discover, instead, 
> that there is significant support for numbered divs within Council, #1 
> would be be inappropriate. Since we have a conference call coming up 
> very shortly, would that be a good time to take a quick straw vote?

Personally I don't like them, and I'm pretty sure(?) that no Council members are holding a candle for numbered divs. Given the sheer amount of hassle involved; the extra complexity in the model; even a probable requirement to introduce tricky special case handling into the schema compiler ... it seems madness to me, personally, to keep hold of them, absent some pretty strong reason to hang onto them. Certainly anyone migrating from P4 to P5 will have significant work to do, upgrading their software systems to handle e.g. namespaces, etc, and this change would surely be the least of their worries. So I don't think that migration itself should be seen as an obstacle.

Regarding "named" divs such as chapter, section, would those introducing such customisations wish to add them to a div2like class or a div3like class? Or would they be divlike or merely classless?

>From my experience, the only rationale I've heard for numbered divs is that they make it convenient to go from the start of a div2 (for instance) to the end of that corresponding div2, by searching for the </div2>, where the use of un-numbered divs would make that impossible. Are there other justifications? Would it help to look at what the benefits of numbered divs are perceived to be?

Cheers

Con