On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Trent Shipley wrote:

> I am working on my dissertation.  My pet peeve is having to use a kludge like:
>
> <note type="draftComment">Expand discussion of the above ethnographies</note>
>
> for comments that should show up in pre-publication formmated copies.
>
> When working with transcription, archival, or literary material the same need
> shows up when scholars need to attach ephemeral comments as reminders to
> themselves or other team members.
>
> The SGML
>
> <!-- *this is ae comment about the SGML code itself* -->
>
> is unsatisfactory because you want to selectively access the draftComment
> data for processing.  Indeed, you might want to carry it indefinitely as a
> way to automatically document the scholarly process.

If you are committed to SGML-only solutions, what about using marked
sections? You can selectively include or exclude the contents based on the
value of an entity defined in the document type subset. E.g.:

<!doctype tei.2 PUBLIC "-//TEI//DTD TEI Lite 1.6//EN" [
    <!ENTITY % comment 'INCLUDE' >
]>

[...]

<![ %comment; [
  <note>Expand discussion of the above ethnographies</note>
]]>

That way you can have the notes be included or not by changing the value of
just the one entity. Some sgmls parsers, like James Clark's nsgmls, will
even allow you to do that from the command line.

- Gregory Murphy <[log in to unmask]>
   __o   Software Engineer
 _`\<,_  Solaris Software
(*)/ (*) Sun Microsystems