[tei-council] spanning milestones

[Lou Burnard]

I just added the following proposal to the sf feature request queues....

Make all milestoneLike elements spanning

Adding all model.milestoneLike elements to the att.spanning class would 
address
some outstanding issues about the handling of multiple hierarchies in
a simple way. It would deliver on the rather vaguely worded promise
that TEI supports both a page-line and a div-para hierarchy, by
simplifying automatic conversion between them, and also addressing a
long standing technical issue about handling page boundaries.

For example:

<p xml:id="para1"> ... <pb n="1" xml:id="pb1" spanTo="#pb2"/> ... </p>
<p xml:id="para2"> ... <pb n="2" xml:id="pb2" spanTo="#pb3"/> ... </p>

could then be automatically processed into

<milestone unit="p" xml:id="para1" spanTo="#para2"/> ...
<page n="1" xml:id="pb1"> ... 
<milestone unit="p" xml:id="para2" spanTo="#para3"/>
</page>
<page n="2" xml:id="pb2" spanTo="#pb3"/>
<milestone unit="p" xml:id="para3" spanTo="#para4"/>


Cost is that you have to have identifiers on everything. Concerns that
the spanning links only go in one direction could be addressed by
extending att.spanning to provide additionally a @spanFrom attribute.

Could also consider not using xml:id but ident/key co-reference. This
would effectively implement "horse".