Re: INS, DEL and Collaborative Document Design

   From: mjhanna@sandia.gov (Michael J Hannah)

|   I believe that the CLASS attribute proposed as part of the style sheet
|   discussion, especially the ability to collect/specify multiple classes,
|   can provide the identification of change submissions and/or
|   contributor.  CLASS can also be used to identify the types of changes
|   mentioned (new, deleted, moved) and an appropriate style sheet can
|   render them in a manner in which each can be distinguished.
|     e.g.  <SPAN CLASS="fred added">new text from Fred</SPAN>
---

I can see how this handles inserted and deleted text, but I don't think
it addresses moved text, where some association has to be made between
the old location and the new location.  Just having moved-deleted and
moved-added classes doesn't connect the SPANs.

|
|   The discussion about "meta-text" (e.g. comments/justification?) might
|   be handled with the proposed footnote <FN> element.  Footnotes, coupled
|   with identification of various CLASSes of footnotes (comment, or
|   justification, or alternative text), might provide this functionality.
---

This has the same problem as moved text.  A footnote is a relationship
between a point in the document and some content; meta-text is a
relationship between some content and some other content.
I haven't seen the proposal for FN, but I doubt it connects the
footnote to an area.  Leaving aside the question of non-hierarchical
areas (there is no reason a commenter's comment would identify a
region that corresponded to hierarchically convenient elements),
I think the described meta-text capabilities require making an
association between a SPAN (an area within the document) and some content.

I think to do this right you need to add LINK-REL and LINK-HREF
attributes to SPAN, to indicate a relationship between SPANs, or define
a new SPANLINK element that specifies a relationship between two
SPANs (or a more general ELEMENTLINK that connects any two elements that
have names or IDs).

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Tuesday, 12 December 1995 16:44:52 UTC