Norm Wolcott wrote:
One could make the argument that the paragraph and perhaps the chapter are useful tags. Poetry and sidenotes and footnotes seem fairly established in PG without attitional tagging. Also will we be scanning 20 editions of Dickens, all with different line breaks and page numbers?
Well, since I sort of initiated this sub-thread, let me note that the addition of an optional "page break" element in OpenReader is instigated mostly by the needs of modern educational books, where there may be mixed use with co-existing paper and ebook versions. And, yes, this feature has been asked for by a user agent vendor working with the educational community. Of course, this feature may be used to preserve page breaks for other purposes and sources, such as PG/DP. Do note that there exist lots of scholarly references which point to particular pages in particular paper manifestations of a work, so having page break info may eventually prove useful to interlink all the old stuff (provided, of course, that the focus is on preserving "manifestation" information in the master digital documents.) I don't see as much use for the line break empty tag, but we plan to include it so it's there for those who wish to use it. In the demo OpenReader Publication of "My Antonia", the line break element will be included. I'm still going over Marcello's suggestions, plus rereading the Unicode annex about line breaking (which *does* cover, in a general way, the unusual ways line breaks are done in LOTE, such as older German and Dutch.) The other part of this sub-thread, the discussion of FRBR, is also interesting. I discovered the FRBR a few years ago, and find it very useful to understand how to categorize textual works. I like to refer to the system it describes as "WEMI", which rhymes with "hemi" (for you auto buffs out there): Work -- Expression -- Manifestation -- Item http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf (WEMI is the mnemonic I use to remember the system!) Regarding "expression" versus "manifestation" in the digitization of public domain materials, such as done by DP and PG, I've made my thoughts known the last couple years, so I'll refrain from getting into that again at this time! Jon Noring