[tei-council] reminder

[David Sewell]

On Sat, 27 Jun 2009, Gabriel BODARD wrote:

> Some suggestions:
>
> (9bis) I suppose it would be a little too controversial to suggest
> changing the expansion of 'lb' to "line begins" rather than line break?

You know, we could probably devote an entire day of a face-to-face 
meeting debating this one. (It would affect <pb> and <cb> as well.)

My first reaction was "that's crazy". My immediately following second 
reaction was "that's brilliant"--once I realize how powerful a mnemonic 
the semantic difference is. If we are being Whorfians, we could call 
this renaming the best way to help the TEI community realize that 
pb/lb/cb are supposed to mark the beginning of an object rather than the 
end or separation between objects. (Something I don't think I realized 
until I had been working with TEI for quite a while, and I don't think 
I'm alone, judging from threads I remember on TEI-L.)

But we are ambiguous throughout the Guidelines about whether cb/lb/pb 
are (1) milestone markers indicating the beginning of something, or (2) 
boundary markers separating two objects of the same type.

Not something to tackle before the next point release of P5, I think.

(The Wikipedia article on "Newline" notes a similar confusion over 
whether a newline character functions as a separator or a terminator.)

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
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