Lee Passey wrote:
Well, I carefully decomposed the TEI DTD and discovered that you're absolutely right (but you knew that already, didn't you :-)). As I understand it, a <div> can contain just about any other element, but once you include another <div> you can't include anything else (almost).
What the hell were they thinking?
I don't see anything in the English spec that would have led me to this conclusion, and I can't think of any rationale why it should be this way. Is it possible that the DTD has incorrectly implemented the TEI spec? Or did the authors really intend this inane result? I have to admit, this requirement (and the fact that <div> is not allowed inside <p>) really makes me have second thoughts about the usefulness of TEI as an encoding (because it hinders you from making a level-one, incomplete, encoding).
This "quirk" is intended and many a rebarbative mail has been written on the TEI-L mailing list defending or belittling this choice. You may subscribe and start another thread. Maybe they'll get tired of explaining this thing to people and change it in the new TEI revision. (I've done this 2 years ago and it did me no good.) -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org