On 25 Aug 2005, at 15:07, Lee Passey wrote:
Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> wrote:
Lee Passey wrote:
On the other hand, I don't see how Mr. Hutchinson's second example could validate if the first does not, particularly given the fact that DTD's are not structured in such a way to permit a validator to make that kind of a judgment ("if a <div> contains a <div> it must be the last element of the first <div>" or "if a <div> contains a <div> it may be preceded by a <p>, but not followed by one").
This simple declaration does exactly that:
<!ELEMENT div (p*, div*)>
"A div may contain zero or more p followed by zero or more div."
I would really like to know what the rationale for this rule is.
There's been much discussion about this on the TEI-L, but not much resolution, as far as I can tell. Here's what Lou Burnard wrote in the "<p> and <divN>" thread: "There is a long tradition of embedding distinct narratives within an overarching framing narrative: as well as the Arabian nights, we could cite Bocaccio, Chaucer etc. I continue, stubbornly, to think that the right way to deal with these is as embedded texts. The one which my learned colleague Rahtz refers to is rather different: here we have a distinct paragraph-like object within a div which has the unusual property of itself containing paragraph-like objects, but which is not really a self-contained text. We could call it a paraDiv and maybe, if we can find more evidence, it should be admitted into P5." It would seem that most often, a text (like a letter) included in another text would be marked up something like <q><text>...</text></q> or <ab><text>...</text></ab>. The archives for TEI-L can be found at <http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/tei-l.html>. Just search for "div" among the thread names and you should find plenty discussion about this problem. BTW, is this the sort of thing we should be discussing at gutvol-d? Wasn't there a PG-XML list or something? -- branko collin collin@xs4all.nl