[Bug 558] - paragraph tag needs formatting structure

[Chad Berkley]

Hi Matt,

looks good.  see my comments below.

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 08:50, Matt Jones wrote:
> 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?

I think it should be called para if we think we will move to full
docbook compatibility in the future.  

> 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 think subscript/superscript is needed.  I could also see someone
needing underline and strikethrough.  In docbook, there is also this
idea of a name/value pair list (VariableList) that I think could be
useful.  the docbook SimpleList might also be useful.  Are you going to
make lists nestable?  I kind of think they should be.

Another construct that docbook has that might be needed is LiteralLayout
where all whitespace and linebreaks are preserved.  This is not like a
ProgramListing because a fixed width font is not implied.
> 
> 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.

see http://docbook.sourceforge.net/projects/schema/.  There are several
attempts to write different kinds of schema for docbook including
xml-schema.

chad

-- 
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Chad Berkley
National Center for 
Ecological Analysis 
and Synthesis (NCEAS)
berkley at nceas.ucsb.edu
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