[tei-council] reviewing SA again;what is standoff?

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Something Syd said made me look at SA-LinkingSegmentationAlignment 
(chapter 14, in plain man's talk) again,
and I found myself reading 14.9 with some puzzlement. It talks about

"stand-off, or external, when the tags representing elements are placed 
outside of the text being marked up: elsewhere within the same file, or 
even outside it altogether"

and goes to say how XInclude can be leveraged to do this. It has
an example of how a poem in plain text can be TEI-ified
by writing a second document which contains a series
of <l> elements each with an XInclude which specifies
a set of words/characters. A merging process is decribed by
which a new 3rd document is created by merging the two together.

Now, I don't say that 14.9 is telling porkies, but is this
really what most people think of when they say "standoff"?
and is it really the use-case we think of when we consider
using XInclude?

I think of "standoff" as being when some markup in document A
says things about markup in document B; thus if document
B has 67 paragraphs and 14 images, then document A makes
claims about how the two relate together.

But before I go on, a sanity check - am I simply
misunderstanding the common use of "standoff"?

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      

Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
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