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

[James Cummings]

Syd Bauman wrote:
>>>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 the quoted passage[1] is exactly what people mean when they
> say "standoff". XInclude is only one method of accomplishing
> stand-off markup, a method that you might argue is less than ideal.
> Stand-off is only one use-case for XInclude, and I daresay it is one
> of the less common ones, at that. Boilerplate text or managing
> chapters is probably much more common.

For the record, I tend to automatically think of link/join/span when 
someone talks about stand-off markup.  So I think of it not so much 
the "tags representing elements" in another location as 'additional 
interrelations between existing elements' which I think of first when 
one mentions stand-off.  I realise this distinction is probably 
trivial, or based on my own misunderstandings, and discussed earlier 
in the same chapter.    The inclusion of virtual content with XInclude 
(as you suggest) to include boilerplate text or managing chapters 
somehow seems like something slightly different to me.  (But as you 
say this is a more common use, so is it discussed elsewhere?)  I don't 
think most people are going to use XInclude in the manner shown in 
14.9.5., but in much more simplistic ways.

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford