Re: another vote for spans

At 3:13 PM +0000 3/10/97, Lou Burnard wrote:
> .... I would like the
>ERB to reconsider its decision to disallow the spanning mechanism defined by
>echte TEI x-pointers.
>
>It seems to me that the ability to point/link/target not just "that blort" or
>"blort number 3" but also "everything from blort no 3 to blort number 12"
>is an
>extremely useful and intuitively simple requirement. The whole point of using
>extended pointers is to cater for the unexpected, unmarked up, and not
>necessarily hierarchically well-formed in a document, which this very simple
>mechanism gives you, at no extra cost, as well as the ability to point to
>entirely natural concepts like "the first six paragraphs of this book",
>"chapters 12 to 14", etc. I don't believe that it adds much to complexity of
>implementation -- you only have to be able to proceed sequentially through a
>document from one location to another -- and it certainly doesn't add much to
>the complexity of understanding.
>
>So how about it ERB?

I would also like to reinforce Lou's request. This was one of my first
comments on the initial draft, and it didn't generate any stinging
refutations. I think we need to be able to annotate resources that we can't
write on (_one_ reasong xlinks are so nice) -- and that means that there
may not be a convenient element to hang the notation on. And there may be
situations where an author wants to provide optional fine-grained links
without clogging the inline markup with a set of tags whose only purpose is
to serve as an anchor.

   Finally, of course, I don't see that there's that much of a problem
implementing such links -- it's a _very_ simple generalization of regular
xlinks.

>(I would however strongly support any proposal for a less confusing pair of
>attribute names than FROM and TO, if only I could think of them)

Yes we do. I thought start/end might be better, but it collides with
linkend. and linkendstart and linkendend is confusing!

  -- David

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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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Received on Tuesday, 11 March 1997 10:20:43 UTC