Article:		To Tag or Not to Tag
Subject:		Can TEI/XML really address the problem?
Date:		2004-05-29 00:08:13
From:		alexbrn
I'd always thought a variorum Shakespeare is *the* example of a text that could test and possibly break many assumptions about XML's suitable for text encoding. While TEI/XML can no doubt be used to drive a rendition of a variorum Shakespeare, isn't there an opportunity here to try and capture something deeper about the state of the texts? An 'ideal' digital variorum should be capable of capturing all significant variant editions and commentaries, and be extensible to add in later layers if desired. The problem seems to me to be that such an ideal 'document' is not hierarchical. The tree model that XML suggests breaks down when the stucture (act and scene divisions, who is speaking, lineation, even the language) is not essential to the text, but varies from edition to edition. Isn't the model more akin to one where multiple layers have synchronisation points (which raises questions of what to synchronise with what)? Or to one where sets of overlapping (rather than nested) structures apply. Maybe some more unorthodox technologies like JITTs [1] or Xandu [2] could come into play here ... ? [1] http://www.sbl-site2.org/Extreme2002/ [2] http://xanadu.com/

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• Can TEI/XML really address the problem?
  2004-05-29 00:46:02 Sancho Neves-Graca [Reply]
  
  You suggest that XML might not be able to cope with complex documents because of its tree structure. The tree structure is not per se a limiting structural aspect of XML documents. What constrains the structure of an XML document is its schema, what guides the processing are path values and linking elements, and what does the processing are the parsers and transformators. The constraints you indicate are well within the practices of experienced XML developers. It might help you to think whether some mathematical structure with a known visualization can be described in XML, and whether mathematical images described in separate XML documents could be cross-referenced or merged. With the soup of XML technologies (do not reduce your view of XML just to the XML trees!), XML, XSL, XPath, XPointer, etc, many of these structures can be represented. It sure won't be NVS that will break the limits of the XML toolset.