[tei-council] Stand Off Markup

[James Cummings]

Dear Council,

As we were all actioned in the last minutes, and since I'm going away for a
week's holiday, I've read 14.9, the section on stand-off markup.  I didn't
realise the way xinclude dealt with potentially overlapping markup as detailed
in 14.9.3, that is good to know and I'm glad it is detailed there.

I've got no major concerns (though I did feel that there could be more examples
and that both 14.9.3 and 14.9.5 especially would not suffer from more
explanation even if redundant, perhaps demonstrating the various kinds of
applications people might make of it.  (Not just xinclude this paragraph.)  By
the way, the sentence in 14.9.5 after the first example mentions <text> but
really means 'text' or 'text()', I think. There is no <text> in the example.

But I think xinclude is the right idea, and the TEI XPointer Schemes detailed in
14.2.4 are wonderful.

I think back to using xptr to grab ranges of verses (breaking over chapters)
from the bible to import into marked-up liturgical documents, and think that if
I had had a decent xinclude processor implementation and if the TEI had
recommended its use, that I would have saved myself a lot of XSLT headaches.

-James

-- Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford James dot
Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk