RE: role "statement"

+1 but with some further thoughts. And thanks for the mention of NLM/JATS/BITS which imo has a lot of other handy features of interest (milestones come immediately to mind, for example, which get you out of the well-formedness pickle).

One thought on <statement> though: I wonder if it should be a phrase level element. While you're correct, a "statement" is usually set off quite clearly (but can occur at any level), I can envision a publisher needing to identify a formal statement that is contained within a paragraph, for example.

Here is a possibly relevant use case (but maybe not) from one of my clients, a standards publisher. Their standards typically begin with a chapter consisting of formal definitions of terms, and when any of those terms are used in the content _in that formal sense_ (in any form, e.g. plural or singular, various verb forms, etc.) that word or phrase is explicitly tagged as such (but not when the same word is used not in that formal sense), and specially formatted in rendering (bold italic in print, red online, etc.). So that has the sense of "formal" but it really doesn't have the sense of "statement." Hmm.

And at the other end of the scale, very complex content can be a formal statement, as you mentioned: e.g., in law, a judicial ruling, a statute, an ordinance, etc.

Which makes me wonder if really this shouldn't be a @role attribute value after all. That way any available structural component of a document can be designated as a "formal statement" or even just "formal".

--Bill K

From: Peter Krautzberger [mailto:peter.krautzberger@mathjax.org]
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2015 10:08 AM
To: DPUB-ARIA (public-dpub-aria@w3.org); W3C Digital Publishing IG
Subject: role "statement"

Hi,

As per today's DPUB-ARIA call, I wanted to separate out an item from an earlier discussion in December.

I would like to propose a role "(formal) statement".

Here's a work-in-progress definition.

A minor structural division in a work, typically encapsulated in a major division. A fragment that is part of the overall flow (i.e., not an aside) but is distinguished from the surrounding content (often typographically) and might be referenced elsewhere (in particular, often carries a label).

Among other things, statements are content fragments that might be aggregated in some form of index (comparable to figures).

Use cases come from humanities (postulate), law (via Bill Kasdorf), sciences (hypothesis, experiment, ansatz, result, example), math (theorem, proof, definition, proposition, lemma, corollary).

Statements are similar to figures except it's more textual and never floating. In HTML5, I'd expect it to be mostly applied to <section> though <p> or <div> might often work, too.

Looking at the already proposed roles, statement appears a bit meta -- question, answer, practice seem to be statements, too. For full disclosure, a <statement> element is part of NLM/JATS/BITS.

Best regards,
Peter.