Re: BOS clarification?

> I'm having trouble matching up what Eliot and Steve are saying about BOS
> with what I know from the 1992 version of 10744, section 6.2.4.2.  In part:
> 
>   A bounded object set can be determined authomatically by the HT engine
>   by constructing an "entity tree", starting with the SGML doc entity of 
>   the hub doc as the root.  The entity tree includes external entities
>   declared in the hub doc, then external entities declared in those
>   entities, and so on. ...  A limit can be placed on the depth of the
>   entity tree by the "bounding level" att of the hub document. ...
> 
> The bounding level att works only when my work happens to end at
> the same level throughout, so appears not to be a solution.

Yeah, this didn't work.  The HyTime Technical Corrigendum does it
differently.  In the TC, there is a common data attribute that
optionally appears on each entity declaration which separately
declares for that entity how deeply to recurse.  There are a couple of
other features, too.

> Does this not mean that every external entity declared in the hub doc
> (and every external entity in those entities) is part of the BOS?  And
> might it not be the case that I declare as entities in my hub doc
> certain public text (part of the US Constitution, for example) that
> are not part of my copyrighted intellectual property?  (I might
> declare them for the use of links that refer or traverse to them,
> rather than for transclusion.)  
> 
> So isn't BOS applicable to the problem of defining the extent
> of my intellectual property/literary work only if I can contrive
> not to declare as external entities anything that doesn't belong
> to the work?

No.  I'm embarrassed that I was so unclear.  I was not proposing that
the BOS represents a set of intellectual property.  I was proposing
that an ilink (now "hylink" in HyTime) be used to express the fact
that document A contains the intellectual property notices that govern
documents B, C, and D.  The hylink can be in document A, B, C, D, or
E.  Whatever document the hylink is in must be guaranteed to be in the
BOS, or the application won't know about it and therefore can't
display the legal notices.  (That's where the BOS notion comes in.)  I
was also saying that any document which contains a link that is used
to traverse to another document is itself guaranteed to be in the BOS,
unless the user takes special pains to delete it from the BOS after
arriving.  So, BOS discipline can be relied upon to guarantee that
legal notices (and, needless to say, any other annotations) can be
made available from within read-only documents which themselves
contain no evidence that such notices/annotations exist.

There are additional details, but that's the fundamental idea.

Best regards,

--Steve

             Steven R. Newcomb   President
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Received on Tuesday, 31 December 1996 19:08:36 UTC