Re: separator abuse

Edward Lass wrote:
> You mean verses might not fit neatly into paragraphs? You mean the Bible
> doesn't consist of hierarchical information?
> 
> You mean one of the most important historical works in human history
> (to say nothing of its spiritual significance for many) can't become
> well-formed XML?

It can. But if we accept the fact that the Bible doesn't have any 
logical connection between paragraphs and sections we cannot markup 
it as a tree where a paragraph is always inside a section.

And as Johannes Koch already mentioned, this multi-hierarchical 
structure is no different from musical notation with notes, bars, 
beams and slurs.

Either you come up with a new markup languages MusicML and BibleML 
to somehow represent this kind of structure or you cannot markup the 
whole thing with semantic markup.

One could represent the Bible as a sequence of <section> elements 
that contain only <l> elements. A paragraph change in the Bible is 
represented by an empty <l> element. It's not a nice semantic coding 
of the Bible but it's still well-formed XML.

There must be some rules that we all have to adhere to or there's no 
way to markup a document with a semantic markup. XHTML2 already 
defines things such as headers, sections and paragraphs. If you come 
up with some historical document that has no logical connection 
between these things, there's no point trying to mark up that 
content with the elements defined in XHTML2.

A piece of text inside XHTML2 file should be surrounded by <section> 
and </section> tags only and only if it matches semantically the 
<section> element's semantics defined in XHTML2. The semantics of 
<p> element defined in XHTML2 (or any version of HTML) doesn't match 
the semantics of paragraph in the Bible so it's logically an error 
to try to use that markup for a paragraph of the Bible.

-- 
Mikko

Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2005 08:32:58 UTC