I can't claim as long an acquaintance with the history of the
floating div problem. As Michael and others have pointed out, <div>
is intended to subdivide the text and it is right that it should not
float--this would be contrary to its mission. The usual
counterproposal for the floating function is <text>, which can appear
in all sorts of places. I think <text>, rather than <div>, provides
the right basic model for thinking about these things, since they
might conceivably be entire documents. But using <text> itself (as
is often recommended) makes claims about the independence of the blob
in question which it appears many people are reluctant to make
(witness the recurrence of this debate). It has always seemed strange
to me that a unit that occurs at the highest level--in effect, the
root element of the entire document--could also occur within a
paragraph.
I think it would help to have another element (structurally, it could
be syntactic sugar for <text>) for big floating text blobs that are
not subdivisions. It should be conceptually allied with <text> rather
than with <div>, to emphasize its difference from the
tesselating/dividing world. It could be embedded in a <quote> if it
was in fact a quotation (addressing Nick's suggestion), but it would
not itself imply quotedness, which is a separate characteristic and
not always present. These embedded things are not always quotes, are
not always presented as quotes, shouldn't be required to be allied
with quotes.
This approach would be an advantage for a few reasons:
--one could adjust the internal structure of this blob element
without affecting the structure of <text>, if one wished for instance
to eliminate <front> and <back>, which for many documents never
appear in embedded texts, or if one wanted to go further and make the
content model of the blob element be the same as <body> (perfect for
many purposes)
--one could give it a type= attribute to allow distinctions between
letters, stories, poems, dramatic segments, etc., which is one of the
features one likes about <div> (of course, one could give <text> a
type attribute too, but while we're at it...)
--it would limit the confusion that arises about what a "text" or a
<text> is in the TEI world, by no longer requiring the encoder to use
<text> and hence define it in a way that justifies its use for
embedded blobs.
Call it <xtext> or <inText> or <embedText> or whatever you like.
best wishes, Julia
Women Writers Project
Brown University
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