Henry S. Thompson wrote:
 
> I actually subscribe to an alternative view, first advanced to my
> knowledge with his customary and much-missed acerbity by Erik Naggum,
> that multiple overlapping hierarchies should be handled by standoff
> markup, hyperlinked onto a base document, rather than internally at
> all.  For an introduction to this approach and our tools which support
> it, please see my SGML Europe '97 paper entitled "Hyperlink semantics
> for standoff markup of read-only documents", available at
 
I think that given infinite resources, all tagging should be done
out-of-line. After all, the act of marking up a document according to
one document type typically destroys some information and makes some
processes harder to do (e.g. marking up concurrent hierarchies,
proximity search, etc.) Unfortunately out-of-line tagging, is a major
pain in the butt to handle manually.
 
Even with editing tools there would be problems where a small bug in the
program could result in instances that are almost impossible to fix or
which are interpreted differently from application to application. We
need much more robust linking technology deployment before I would trust
this day to day! Still, I think that this is the future. Just as Dr.
McCoy can fix your appendix up without slicing you open, I should be
able to easily tag a document without changing it.
 
 Paul Prescod