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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Okay (aka the tail eats the snake)


Well, I was thinking of the practical aspect, namely, that you (that's
impersonal, the 'you') might want to do something different with continued
lists, without having to look ahead (and without establishing parameters
for looking ahead, e.g., this list tag is continued, not the next).  For a
simple example, the 1st part of the list might have text appended ("...to
be continued"), or not.

The attribute approach to continued lists so offended my prissy sense of
logic and order, I investigated the TEI DTD, hoping to find support...no
such luck, and at first, despite my bias toward a 'literate' DTD, I liked
the swarm of attributes hovering around TEI list tags even less than the
DocBook approach.  Sure, either DTD could be customized to satisfy my
discontent, but that ....

Finally, though, I decided that, even though the TEI framers had evidently
abdicated in the face of the complexities of list types, they had at least
abdicated without leaving hesitation marks--by which I mean that, after
due consideration, the whole notion of ordered versus unordered lists as
supported by DocBook elements seemed spurious, in that distinct tagging of
the two was, in fact, tagging of a presentation aspect; i.e., all lists
are ordered when presented, yet some are _enumerated_ (that is, presented
with a _labelled_ order).  It seems to me to be clear that whether a list
is continued or not is a structural element supervening the list type,
while whether a list is enumerated or not, and how so, is a presentational
attribute of the list.

In any case, many thanks for your response.

Eric Lawson



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