[tei-council] [Fwd: Re: <note place="foot"/> vs. <note place="bottom"/>]

[James Cummings]

David Sewell wrote:
> Doing Google searches on
> 
>    "note place foot" TEI
> 
> and
> 
>    "note place bottom" TEI
> 
> is instructive.  [95 to 2 for the former.]

Instructive and strange, I get 42 or 80 (the latter showing 'all 
results') I don't think it matters, just interesting. (Yes, I went to 
google.com specifically instead of .co.uk, etc. etc.)

The reason I was doing so was to then query removing the various TEI 
sites to see how many other people do this.  But it didn't make much 
difference: many of the documents it finds are TEI Lite or similar 
mentions on other people's sites. I was only interested because 
Democracy By Google, is a frightening concept. ;-)

> I'd say we are outvoted. I think the rationale for "bottom" was symmetry 
> with "top" (as a "topnote", if that exists, is something different from 
> a "headnote", which appears at the start of a text).

Paul's sensible distinction between bottom and foot not withstanding, I 
think the rationale for choosing 'bottom' was that it is used in other 
electronic page description languages (CSS and XSL-FO for example use 
left, right, top, and bottom).  Because of its use in these languages 
'bottom' seems a de facto standard to me.  However, these do usually 
refer to the boundaries of any element rather than a location on a 
physical page.  But I still like bottom(s).

-James
-- 
Dr James Cummings, Research Technologies Service, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk