RE: Can XSLT help with overlapping structures (was: XML slic

> Linda van den Brink writes:
>  > nesting rules. When working with TEI I encountered two 
> possible ways of
>  > solving the problem of overlapping structures: using empty 
> elements to mark
>  > one of the structures (used by Sydney), for example page 
> breaks, or using
>  > elements that you indicate as being interrelated and 
> together representing
>  > an element in one of the structures. (In TEI I used SPANs for this)
> Sebastian writes: 
> Your example seems to assume a *non*-overlapping structure, whereas
> Sydney had a page break in the middle of a <div>, unless I
> misinterpret you. 
No, my example intended to show how to *use* a non-overlapping structure to
represent an overlapping structure. Instead of having empty markers, I have
page elements that nest inside divs and contain other elements (like p,
note, list). Look again: 

<div type="chapter">
<page nr="1"><!-- start of first page -->
<p>...</p>
</page><!-- end of first page *element* to avoid mallformed nesting because
of overlapping structure -->
<div type="part">
<page nr="1"><!-- start of second page element that *still indicates the
first physical page* -->
<p>...</p>
<note>...</note>
<list><item>...</item></list>
</page><!-- End of first page -->

<snip/>

> one has to ask *why* Sydney wants to do this splitting up. 

Of couse, Sydney could have a wrong reason for wanting to do this, but there
can be valid cases where one wants to do this. Someone could be transcribing
an edition of a (old) text and want to markup the page break structure as
well as the chapter/paragraph structure. From one point of view the first of
these structures could be significant, from another point of view the second
structure could be, so you want to capture them both. Then when you want to
output the transcribed source using the page break structure, showing the
text page by page just like in the edition you're transcribing, you face
this problem. 

A document can have two (or more) structures and it's difficult to represent
this in SGML/XML. It's interesting to see if XSLT can deal with this. What's
the best way to represent multiple structures in XML so that XSLT can work
with those structures? 

Hey, I'm just interested in this stuff 

Linda


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