[tei-council] Physical bibliography

[Matthew James Driscoll]

I was asked (or volunteered, I can't remember) many moons ago to look at the
draft proposal for marking up the physical structure of books and
manuscripts (PB), and propose alternative solutions in cases where I found
the markup unnecessarily verbose. Having now finally done so, I see that my
alternative solutions are essentially the same as those proposed by Dot in a
posting to the council on 2 August 2006, viz. replacing the bulk of the
elements with attributes. So, according to Dot and me, instead of:

<gatheringRange signed="yes">
    <start>A</start>
    <end>C</end>
    <leaves>4</leaves>
</gatheringRange>

one could have

<gatheringRange signed="yes" start="A" end="C" leaves="4"/>

I'm assuming non-Latin, e.g. Greek and Hebrew, signatures can easily be
acoommodated through the magic of Unicode.

The insertion and cancellation of leaves should also be easily dealt with,
e.g.

<gatheringRange signed="yes" start="A" end="C" leaves="4" added="B3"
missing="C2"/>

The same applies to <pageRange>. Format, signature alphabet and other things
where there is a finite number of possibilities could also be dealt with
using attributes.

Matthew