[tei-council] pb, lb

[Arianna Ciula]

Hi all,

I know this seems like awaking dead cats (is this an idiom at all?), but 
do we still intend to do something about the beginning/break ambiguity 
and the implicit hierarchy of milestones elements?

Has something being done in the prose of the guidelines that I missed?

I am asking because today I was asked to explain the example available 
on the reference specs for <lb/> 
(http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-lb.html):

<docTitle>
  <titlePart type="main">
   <lb/>THE
  <lb/>Pilgrim's Progress
  <lb/>FROM
  <lb/>THIS WORLD,
  <lb/>TO
  <lb/>That which is to come:
  </titlePart>
<!-- etc. -->
</docTitle>

...and that <lb/> at the beginning is not consistent with other examples...

Arianna

Dan O'Donnell wrote:
> Would renaming them pageBegin, lineBegin etc., in the prose not go a
> long way to solving some of the inconsistent use on short notice? It
> wouldn't control for either this or the issue of <pb/><lb/><cb/> vs
> <pb/> but it would go a good way to influencing behaviour on the first
> issue right away. And perhaps a small paragraph or sentence or too in
> the guidelines based on Lou's essay would help influence behaviour on
> the second issue.
> 
> On Fri, 2007-28-09 at 14:35 +0200, Laurent Romary wrote:
>> I would definitely support this!
>> Laurent
>>
>> Le 28 sept. 07 à 12:10, Lou Burnard a écrit :
>>
>>> Here is a small essay on this topic, with a suggestion at the end.
>>>
>>> Most milestone units indicate a change of state of some kind. The
>>> default assumption is that the old state ceases to apply and the new
>>> state starts to apply at the point the milestone tag is inserted in  
>>> the
>>> text. Consequently if for some state (say "being on page 42") there is
>>> no milestone, you are not yet in that state. This is the rationale for
>>> saying that you must put a <pb> before the material on page 42, not
>>> after it.
>>>
>>> There is another interpretation of milestones, which is that they are
>>> solely there to mark points (like <anchor>s). In this sense, the <lb/>
>>> for example doesn't really mark a change of state (from "being on this
>>> line" to "being on a different line") but simply the notional point
>>> between the two lines. But this looks like sophistry to me.
>>>
>>> I think there are two real usage issues that need to be addressed
>>> somehow. The first is that *some* milestone changes imply changes in
>>> others Changing from one page to the next implies of necessity  
>>> changing
>>> from one line to the next and (if I am doing columns) one column to  
>>> the
>>> next. So there is an implicit hierarchy in which inserting a <pb/>
>>> notionally inserts also a <lb/> and a <cb/> at the same point, just as
>>> inserting a <cb/> implies inserting an <lb/> : you just cannot have a
>>> column or a line which spans a page break, without doing violence  
>>> to the
>>> definition of what "column" or "line" means.
>>>
>>> Note that this is by no means true of all milestones -- indeed the  
>>> main
>>> reason for introducing milestones is precisely to allow for units  
>>> which
>>> do not behave in this way. But, I contend, it *is* true of the three
>>> mentioned here, which are also, probably, the three most frequently  
>>> used!
>>>
>>> If you grant the possibility of "implicit" milestones (and you can of
>>> course say "this is XML: we don't do minimization") then you also have
>>> to confront the fact that some milestones are implicit in the  
>>> deployment
>>> of other elements. For example, part of the definition of <p> or <l>
>>> (but not, I suggest, <item> or <div> ) is that they have an implied
>>> <lb/> at their beginning. I am not, of course, talking about how we  
>>> want
>>> to render the things, I am talking about how we recognize them. If we
>>> found in our text something which had other paragraph-like properties,
>>> but didn't start a new line, we'd probably have difficulty agreeing  
>>> that
>>> it was a paragraph (in fact, I'm having difficulties thinking how else
>>> we'd identify it at all). If we are marking up a poem, there is  
>>> probably
>>> an implicit <lb/> following each <l> -- so that when a metrical line
>>> gets fractured by the typography, we can happily insert just one <lb/>
>>> solely at that point.
>>>
>>> The trouble is that we have no way, currently, of formally stating  
>>> these
>>> rules of interdependence or implication between elements (assuming,
>>> indeed, that you think they are useful). We cannot easily record  
>>> that a
>>> an occurrence of milestone type x implies an occurrence of  
>>> milestone y,
>>> nor that the presence of element a implies an occurrence of  
>>> milestone x.
>>> And, as I suggested above, you may plausibly say "tough: we don't  
>>> do tag
>>> minimization" and leave it at that.
>>>
>>> Since however <pb> <lb> and <cb> are so widely (and inconsistently)
>>> used, I can't help wondering whether some tighter usage rules for  
>>> these
>>> special cased milestones only -- along the lines indicated above --
>>> might not help the community. What do you think?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Dan O'Donnell wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 2007-26-09 at 12:30 +0200, Matthew James Driscoll wrote:
>>>>> I've always maintained that the "b" stood for "boundary", rather  
>>>>> than
>>>>> "break" (an idea I believe I got from Lou originally), and  
>>>>> insisted that
>>>>> they be put at the front of the thing in question -- don't make  
>>>>> no sense
>>>>> otherwise.
>>>> I think the impetus to put them at the end comes from html:lb usage.
>>>>
>>>>> Matthew
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Lou Burnard [mailto:lou.burnard at oucs.ox.ac.uk]
>>>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 8:34 PM
>>>>> To: tei-council at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>>>>> Subject: Re: [tei-council] pb, lb
>>>>>
>>>>> Dan O'Donnell wrote:
>>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This is probably silly, but I've been teaching a student research
>>>>>> assistant P5 and the issue came up.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Was there not discussion some time ago of changing the name of  
>>>>>> pb and lb
>>>>>> from page break and line break to page begin and line begin?
>>>>> No discussion about changing the name of the element sfaik. But
>>>>> agreement to clarify that th "b" should be understood as implying  
>>>>> you
>>>>> put the thing at the "beginning"
>>>>>>  The
>>>>>> preferred convention is to put milestones at the beginnings of  
>>>>>> spans
>>>>>> they involve (e.g. handShift), right?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>> krekt. " By convention, pb/
>>>>> <http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/P5/Guidelines-web/en/html/ref-pb.html>
>>>>> elements should appear at the start of the page to which they  
>>>>> refer." is
>>>>> what it says in the Good Book.
>>>>>
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-- 
Dr Arianna Ciula
Research Associate
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
2nd Floor
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL (UK)
Tel: +44 (0)20 78481945
http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~aciula/