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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Marking Up Taxonomic Names


Mike Taylor wrote

>Well, no.  Plenty of genus and species names are not particularly
>foreign. They're italicised _because_ they're genus and species
>names. 
>
Whatever their etymology, all names are required to conform to Latin 
grammar and it's my understanding that the origin of the tradition (now 
requirement) to italicise them in print is that of italicising foreign 
phrases. This lead to the acceptability of underlining (if italics are 
not available) since that is the typesetters markup for italicisation.

>(So obviously The Right Answer in DocBook version _n_ is to
>have explicit <taxon type="genus"> and similar tags.  But that's not
>going to happen soon, and probably not at all.)
>  
>
As you say, that's not going to happen soon. I would suggest in any case 
that such an element would need to be more complex, including (at least) 
facilities for authorities and for ensuring logical correctness of the 
taxonomic hierarchy.

Perhaps before that happens we shall see web accessible repositories, 
making a URL reference more relevant than explicit inclusion of the 
textual names!

>The problem is if I run into a stylesheet that decides that it's
>appropriate to, for example, use a bold font for foreign phrases.  For
>taxonomic names, that's not merely inappropriate -- it's just plain
>wrong.  (Biologists are very picky about that kind of thing.)
>  
>
Mechanisms involving the use of "role" attributes rely on specially 
adapted style sheets and ensuring their use. Ensuring the use of style 
sheets which do honour <foreignphrase> in an acceptable way seems to me 
easier, when we are processing our own documents. If we release our 
SGML/XML, we can never prevent the use by a client agent of other style 
sheets and by using a standard near equivalent we maximise the chances 
of an acceptable rendering. I imagine, for example,  that an aural style 
sheet, which might spell out a taxon name rather than try to pronounce 
it in the prevailing natural language, would be more acceptable in more 
circumstances. It will not, I admit, explicitly transmit the concept of 
taxon - but that would require the markup we know we will not have.

Nigel 

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Nigel Hardy     Tel: +44 1970 622 434.   http://users.aber.ac.uk/nwh/
  Dept. Computer Sci,  University of Wales, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, UK
  Adran Cyfrifiadureg, Prifysgol Cymru,     Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, UK






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