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This is exactly right. It merely makes explicit the implicit document boundaries. Consider a piece of fiction, containing no references, no need to index, just a text, and pre-dating any notion of XML. It likely has chapters - in any case, a structure that did not acknowledge the notion of chapters would be poor. Consider the corpus "Harry Potter". Any one book could get away without a container, but it is a set of seven books. A wrapper for each book (call it a "cover") is natural and expected. Now transmit it as one set of text. The covers are still useful. Go to the ancient texts you mentioned. In the Judeo-Christian traditional texts, there are multiple "books". There a five books in the oldest collection, the Pentateuch. These are handled as a book of books. Most such collections include 34 other books in the Hebrew bible. Sometimes they are themselves classified as several other books of books, sometimes not. Some consider each Psalm to be a book. Similarly there are 22 books in the New Testament, the part written in Greek and Latin . These 66 books are often arranged into books: Pentateuch, History, Books of Poetry, Major Prophets, Minor Prophets, Gospels, Church History, Pauline Epistles, General Epistles, Revelation. AN alternate arrangement produces a different set of books of books: Law, History, Wisdom, Prophets Major and Minor, History, Letters. Still another tradition arranges the books into Law, Warriors, Judges, Kings, Prophets, Kingdom. These Books are themselves bound into books with names similar to Old Testament and New Testament. Within those collections, there are a few disputes as to which Book a given Book belongs in. There are 15 more Hebrew books of which the 12 are bound in another book named the Apocrypha in Roman Catholic Tradition. It is interesting that the western Jewish tradition leans on a festival derived from two of the Apocrypha, even though none of the Apocrypha is accepted in the Jewish Bible. Many other "Books" named the :Bible" have included other "Books" including still other Books" Which is a long way of saying that these texts have always had a container, and modern approaches, of containing them all, simply acknowledge them. Similar descriptions could encircle Gilgamesh, or the Upanishads, of the Mayan Codices. Or any autho fro whome the "Collected Works" have been published. "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery Toby Considine TC9, Inc TC Chair: oBIX & WS-Calendar TC Editor: EMIX, EnergyInterop U.S. National Inst. of Standards and Tech. Smart Grid Architecture Committee Email: Toby.Considine@g... Phone: (919)619-2104 http://www.tcnine.com/ blog: www.NewDaedalus.com -----Original Message----- From: Michael Hopwood [mailto:michael@e...] Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 7:14 AM To: dlee@c...; xml-dev@l... Subject: RE: Text Markup Part II >>> What I'm trying to get at is the fundamental rational between what appears to be two extremes not necessarily compatible, and why we ended up with only the later. Actually, and for a very long time before it became "cool" ;) to talk about this, it's really only been the latter, except that the "markup" for the rest of the document is implicit. Adding a "root" tag for the whole document simply formalises and makes machine-readable (although you could have done this a variety of other ways, like filename extensions) what "documentalists" of all kinds have been doing for a very long time; (more or less formally) identifying integral units of documentation. A MARC21 serialisation has message headers to separate different catalogue records in the stream - those are short documents, generally, although they can potentially get very long. And every element, as well as the whole thing, is marked up. _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS to support XML implementation and development. To minimize spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l... subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l... List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
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