Re: ISSUE-47, Markup support for bookmark and clipping support of documents

Hi,

I thought I'd start the discussion on this issue by quoting the 
use-cases presented in the wiki article and discussing them a bit.

> * Authors and users may often want to specify a single point in a
> document or express a clipping of a document that cannot be easily
 > expressed as a well-formed document fragment (i.e., its beginning and
 > ending cannot not be marked by properly nested start and end tags). In
 > other document formats, these marks are often referred to ‘bookmarks’
 > though in a different sense than the URL bookmarks often associated
 > with HTML. Other document formats also support arbitrary clipmarks
 > with a start and end point. Authors and users both make use of these
 > bookmarks and clipmarks in other formats.

This use-case seems to be two use cases (please correct me if I'm wrong):
  - Authors want to specify a single point in a document
  - Authors want to mark a section of a document which falls outside the 
document hierarchy for linking or navigating to

I assume the first is met with the id="" attribute.

The second, well, I think it's slightly mad to want to use a 
hierarchical markup language to express something non-hierarchical; the 
markup will always be a mess and I have no idea how you'd present it 
given that the styling language of the Web relies on hierarchy.

> * A user wants to markup their own copy of a document with important
> bookmarks or passages.

Seems like <m> and id="" would be the already-proposed devices to use 
here-- <m> to markup passages, id for bookmarks.


 > * An author of archival document wants to insert explicit page breaks
 > where pages may break at arbitrary points in a text.

This seems like a very different kind of use-case than the others:
  - if you are archiving paper documents (like e.g. JSTOR.org), then you 
want to use a format designed for archiving paper documents, not a 
hypertextual format with an explicit lack of support for paper documents
  - if you are archiving non-paper documents, then page breaks are not 
something you're worrying about, since there are none to archive.

If the use case is more generally that people want to prepare documents 
for print using HTML, I can imagine that being considerably more common, 
but it isn't related to the other use-cases here.  It should be 
considered separately, perhaps with reference to what, e.g. Prince XML 
does to allow this functionality in HTML.


 > * An author wants to otherwise wrap markup content in a
 > non-hierarchical manner.

I don't think this is a use-case; the use-cases would be the reason why 
they want to why they want to wrap content in a non-hierarchical manner.


Cheers,
A

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2008 20:17:25 UTC