Re: Change Bars DTDlet

Steve Putz (putz@parc.xerox.com)
Fri, 6 Aug 1993 16:09:57 PDT

> Dave Raggett proposes two new ROLE attribute values for
> the HTML+ EM tag, "deletion" and "addition," with a new
> rendering hint, strikeout. Aside from overloading
> EM more, a point of some concern already, and aside from
> the question of whether EM's role attribute ought to have
> a delimited list of values, this won't work when revisions
> cross tag boundaries.

I don't see why it is so important to be able to mark changed sections across tag boundaries with a single pair of tags. To me it seems to violate the concept of semantic tagging. If the last half of paragraph 1 and the first half of paragraph 2 are changed then it makes sense to mark it that way. For example:

<PARA>
Someone changed <EM change>the last half of this paragraph.</EM>
</PARA>
<PARA>
<EM change>The first half of this paragraph</EM>was also changed.
</PARA>

Or maybe it should be <EM ROLE="change">. In any case, it should be easy for an HTML editor to automatically "do the right thing" and split a user's emphasis command into properly nested tags and end tags as necessary to maintain legal syntax. Even for hand written HTML there could be a simple parser that fixes improperly nested tags in the "obvious" way.

This approach seems both cleaner and easier to implement than matching id schemes.

Am I being naive?

-- Steve Putz