[tei-council] span span span span span span span span glorious span

[James Cummings]

On 20/08/11 10:20, Lou Burnard wrote:
> Some might say that these examples all indicate the confusion that
> ensues when you mix the purely documentary view with the textual,
> interpretive one. But just for fun, let's pretend there was some visible
> way of representing the boundaries of personal names in the written
> source in question. It's surely feasible that a scribe might wish to
> show that they were actually referring to a single person called Mr
> Holmes-Burnard? And hence, there needs to be *some* way of indicating
> that the markup is being deleted as well as the content.

That usually with <del> any enclosed markup is also deleted is, I admit, 
a good argument that the same should be true of delSpan. So on 
reflection I think I was wrong and that the default assumption by normal 
people is probably that all markup is deleted...so instead of needing a 
way to indicate that the markup is being deleted, maybe it is the other 
case, that the markup is preserved that needs a way to indicate it?

> My preference therefore for (b) in my original opposition is based on
> the purely pragmatic ground that if you really want to leave the markup
> behind you can do so explicitly by supplying two deletions, as Martin
> observed.

I think providing two deletions when there is a single line (without 
indicating that these are fragmentary elements or something like that) 
is encoding an untruth.

> What worries me more about this, and which no-one has yet observed, is
> the high probability of producing (or implying) an ill-formed document.

But that is true of all other spanning elements as well, no?  <addSpan/> 
or even things like <join/> if you chose to implement it without 
respecting the current XML hierarchy?  With none of these are we 
creating a well-formed XML document that represents both structures, we 
are documenting a textual or graphical phenomenon using one hierarchy or 
the other.  All of this makes me long for easy to use, generic, 
stand-off annotation/encoding tools.

> But using @spanTo is so fraught with the possibilities of
> own-foot-destruction (as James has noted) that one more or less seems
> less of a concern.

I recognise my examples were limited and artificial, I think I know how 
I might encode some of them but it is more that those seem to be 
completely obvious use cases, thus need documenting.


-james

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Manager of InfoDev
Oxford University Computing Services
University of Oxford