Type of codes

[Yves Savourel <ysavourel@enlaso.com>]

Hi everyone,

One last summary on the type of codes discussion.
I've listed below the four options we have:


A) ph, pc, sc/ec

This is the current draft. We allow both pc and sc/ec, the second being used when the first cannot.
The main advantage is that it offers the pc cleanness to users who need it.
It has the drawback of making thing a bit more complex for the tools.


B) ph, sc/ec

This would remove pc, marking all span-like original codes with sc/ec.
It simplifies somehow the writing of the documents.
Its main drawback is that not having a pc notation is not very friendly for XML-like original formats.


C) ph, pc

This would change ph to handle also the sc/ec cases.
This would add several attributes to ph. Essentially it would transfer the syntax of two element names to new attributes in ph.
The pc element would stay to provide a clean markup for the well-formed span-like codes.


D) ph

This would code all cases with ph: One code to rules them all.
The ph element would have many attributes to handle all the cases.
This option is especially attractive for tool extracting only placeholder codes.


Note:

- Regardless of the option, we would still have a distinction between placeholder and span-like codes. In other words, even with option D (<ph> only) a filter should be able to extract an HTML <BR/> and a <B>...</B> making a distinction, for example: <ph id='1'>&lt;BR/></ph> and <ph id='2' kind='start'>&lt;B></ph>...<ph rid='2' kind='end'>&lt;/B></ph>. At some point we'll have to have a discussion about whether extraction tools MUST or only SHOULD do the distinction, but that's independent of the representation.

- Keep also <mrk> in mind. The presence of <pc> would make the use of <mrk> a bit more complex: (e.g. <mrk> overlapping <pc>). But not that much because <mrk> can overlap <mrk> too so the use case exist even if <pc> is not there.


My personal opinion:

I think have distinct elements for original codes that are placeholder vs span-like is useful, even important. So I would not put everything into ph.

I would tend to think having the span-like codes handled only with sc/ec is fine. But looking at how v1.2 is used, the requirements we have for 2.0 and the feedback of the past months, I can see there are arguments for also having pc, and since the drawbacks of keeping pc are not that big I would. We just need to make sure it can be mapped transparently to sc/ec and conversely.

So I would pick option A.


What would you pick and, as importantly, why? (so all can understand the rationale of the choice)

Cheers,
-yves