[Bug 558] - paragraph tag needs formatting structure

[Matt Jones]

Scott, Tim, and anyone else,

Attached you'll find a diagram showing the current model for TextType in 
EML that I've put together.  Any field that currently contains a 
paragraph would be changed to instead be of type TextType. This would 
allow it to be as simple as our current model (e.g., just a list of 
paragraphs containing text), or more complex with sections and titles 
for the sections, and emphasis and lists in the paragraphs.  A couple of 
notes:

1) I didn't include the step/substep stuff.  It seemed to me to be a 
something of a jump from the rest of the markup, and a somewhat 
arbitrary inclusion.  I can add it if people think it would be 
justifiable.  Peter -- how would it fit into the protocol changes?
2) The docbook tag for paragraph is 'para'.  I renamed it 'paragraph' to 
maintain backwards compatibility with older versions of eml.  But if we 
want to use the same element name as docbook then I could rename it 
para.  Opinions?
3) Should we add subscript/superscript?  Enough people will be 
expressing units and stuff in their text block that they might be 
frustrated by the lack of these tags.  are there any other candidate 
additions?

I've attached an instance document to show some of the possible 
structures you can currently get with this module.

Scott Chapal wrote:
 > I agree with this assessment.  Also, you *could* import the entire
 > DocBook namespace in a future EML version, say after the Schema is
 > finalized.  Would you want to do that?  I would conjecture that
 > DocBook will become very relevant in the future and *might* become the
 > default markup for technical documentation.

As far as importing the entire docbook schema, yes I could imagine doing 
so in a later version of EML if docbook provides a schema (somewhat 
unlikely) and EML needs it.

Matt

-- 
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Matt Jones                                    jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439   Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)

Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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