Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
@ Ahi: I see what you mean, and it's good to have some standardization, but I don't believe it is possible to consider all possible variations that could be found in real books. No matter how many pre-specified semantic tags you may invent, there will always be an author and a book who will demand a new one for "this particular piece of information which does not fit any of the above" (but I can't say I know anything about TEI-MEK, for instance).
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The best one can do is to be aware what the given XML dialect will be used for, and cover as much ground as possible, while providing sufficiently usable primitive elements that can be used in combination to make up for a missing (and hopefully hardly never necessary) tag. (In other words, if you cannot describe in a standard and expected way precisely and accurately what something is; do your best to explain what should be done with it/how it should be displayed correctly. Ideally though, 9 out of 10 documents, in fact 99 out of a 100 documents should not need to resort to fallbacks.)
I am not intimately familiar with TEI-MEK yet either... but note that they have several dialects:
- One for academic writing (complex layouts, I believe)
- One for articles--handled fundamentally differently in some ways than books
- One for mixed documents (that, I believe, maximize the available tags/techniques by drawing upon multiple sources)
- One for prose.
- One for drama (i.e.: plays).
- One for verse.
Given this sort of foreplanning, and thoughtful XML dialect design, they ought only rarely come upon material that requires an unusual approach for encoding some piece of it.
- Ahi