Hi Wendell,

Ahh, I fear that I came from way out in left field.  My bad.
You (and Julia) are absolutely right in saying that the binding
order is perfectly clear when going top down with a parser.  For
a variety of reasons to get what I need, I've been thinking about
this as streams rather than trees, so getting a set div hierarchy
is really useful.  But this is too ideosyncratic a view to warrant
general consideration.   Sorry.  I'll go back to my fields and
streams.  :-)

M

>> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:41:26 -0500
>> From: Wendell Piez <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: <div> versus <divN> again
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>> Hi Mark,
>>
>> Could you explain what you mean by "nesting order" in the below?
>>
>> Your argument seems to suggest that the encoder has a choice of what level
>> of numbered div to place inside another, whereas the DTD mandates that
>> inside a div1 can only be a div2, inside a div2 can only be a div3 etc.
>> Given this constraint, an XPath //div1 (in a document where there is no
>> div0) is nothing more than //div[count(ancestor-or-self::div)=1] in a
>> "plain div" model. In other words, given the constraints of the DTD, there
>> is no semantic content whatsoever in the X in "divX" that cannot be equally
>> well derived from inspecting the nesting in the instance.
>>
>> In other words, it's nothing but syntax sugar. To back this claim up, I'd
>> be willing to take a shot at transforming any valid TEI numbered-div
>> structure you want to throw at me into an otherwise-identical TEI with an
>> unnumbered-div structure *and back again*, using plain old XSLT 1.0 and
>> *not* a "level" flag (following David's not unreasonable suggestion). You
>> only need to tell me whether you want the result of the final document to
>> start with a div0 or a div1 (another TEI distinction without a semantic
>> difference).
>>
>> Please explain to me what I'm missing! or show me a numbered-div document
>> where the numbering in the div names provides a semantic otherwise
>> impossible (or even difficult) to derive. I'm willing to be proven wrong.
>>
>> Heck, I think I'll write those stylesheets right now....
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Wendell
>>
>> At 11:20 AM 2/13/2004, you wrote:
>> >Numbered divs are an easy way for the *encoder* to provide the
>> >desired object nesting for indexing/searching, contextualization,
>> >and object display independent of the content of a type attribute.
>> >This is particularly useful if you are implementing a collection,
>> >or any group of collections, that can be made up of any number of
>> >different kinds of divs that require distinct nesting orders.
>> >Unnumbered divs leave it to the implementor to either guess, on
>> >a case by case basis, the best nesting order, or simply to assume
>> >that all divs are equal.  IMHO, having the encoder explicitly
>> >identify the nesting order that s/he considers most appropriate
>> >for a particular document outweighs the implementation problems
>> >that numbered divs might cause.
>>
>>
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