[tei-council] one <exemplum> or many?

[Kevin Hawkins]

On 12/7/2012 10:35 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
> Surely we have more urgent and important matters to work on than this?

I agree, and if I assigned this to myself, I would give it the lowest 
priority compared to the other tickets I still haven't made time for. 
And yet ...

> An exemplum " groups an example demonstrating the use of an element
> along with optional paragraphs of commentary"
>
> As the content model shows, it contains a single<egXML>. Whether that
> contains one or  more occurrence of the element being exemplified is
> entirely an editorial matter. Sometimes it's useful to provide muiltiple
> instances, more usually it isn't.
>
> The content of an egXML is supposed to be well formed, but we relaxed
> the constraint that there has to be a single root containing the whole
> content to permit examples containing mixed content.
>
> In this particular case, does it really matter whether or n ot you
> consider the fact that there are three sponsor elements as exemplying
> the repeatability of<sponsor>  within its parent? Many may elements are
> repeatable within their parent, and for most of them we don't bother to
> indicate the fact when we exemplify them!

The HTML output of the Guidelines labels each <exemplum> with "Example", 
so I find it misleading if a single "Example" contains more than one. 
You might say that this is a problem of the stylesheets that generate 
the output, but I maintain that if exemplum "groups an example", there 
should be a single example in it, not a whole set of them.