I've taken the liberty of starting a new thread since I think this issue is important. It's clear that some people (myself included) would like to capture more information about presentation than would be done if the goal were ONLY semantic markup. It's fine if others don't place any or much importance on that goal, but I hope they will still contribute TEI/markup knowledge so that this choice is supported. Here, I think we can have our cake and eat it too.
Jon Noring typed:
My view is that, as much as possible, make the final master digital content as agnostic with respect to presentation type as possible. And in the rare instances this is not possible, then use SVG
I think there's a better middle ground here. Yes, SVG is useful in "extreme" cases, but I don't think it addresses the primary use case. My suggestion is that structural markup is *required*, and additional presentational markup is *optional*. For those who want an agnostic master file, just ignore the presentational markup -- i.e. we have to design the XML so that the presentation is clearly distinct from structure. Paraphrasing what Brad said to me in an earlier thread, the "rend" attribute describes the original presentation but doesn't enforce any specific output presentation. Here's an example where SVG is clearly overkill: --Introduction-- 1. The Cyclone 2. The Council with the Munchkins Structural markup and regeneration would yield: Introduction 1. The Cyclone 2. The Council with the Munchkins That's perfectly reasonable, and may suffice for most people. I just want there to be a way for those who think it's worth the effort to capture the former presentation in the master file. For example: <head index=" --Introduction--">Introduction</head> Or, using Marcelo's index tag: <index index="toc" level1=" --Introduction--" /> <head>Introduction</head> (In both cases, -- should probably be — and there may be a better solution than hardcoding the leading spaces.) -- Cheers, Scott S. Lawton http://Classicosm.com/ - classic books http://ProductArchitect.com/ - consulting