| I believe that the CLASS attribute proposed as part of the style sheet
| discussion, especially the ability to collect/specify multiple classes,
| can provide the identification of change submissions and/or
| contributor. CLASS can also be used to identify the types of changes
| mentioned (new, deleted, moved) and an appropriate style sheet can
| render them in a manner in which each can be distinguished.
| e.g. <SPAN CLASS="fred added">new text from Fred</SPAN>
---I can see how this handles inserted and deleted text, but I don't think it addresses moved text, where some association has to be made between the old location and the new location. Just having moved-deleted and moved-added classes doesn't connect the SPANs.
| | The discussion about "meta-text" (e.g. comments/justification?) might | be handled with the proposed footnote <FN> element. Footnotes, coupled | with identification of various CLASSes of footnotes (comment, or | justification, or alternative text), might provide this functionality.
---This has the same problem as moved text. A footnote is a relationship between a point in the document and some content; meta-text is a relationship between some content and some other content. I haven't seen the proposal for FN, but I doubt it connects the footnote to an area. Leaving aside the question of non-hierarchical areas (there is no reason a commenter's comment would identify a region that corresponded to hierarchically convenient elements), I think the described meta-text capabilities require making an association between a SPAN (an area within the document) and some content.
I think to do this right you need to add LINK-REL and LINK-HREF attributes to SPAN, to indicate a relationship between SPANs, or define a new SPANLINK element that specifies a relationship between two SPANs (or a more general ELEMENTLINK that connects any two elements that have names or IDs).
scott
-- scott preece motorola/mcg urbana design center 1101 e. university, urbana, il 61801 phone: 217-384-8589 fax: 217-384-8550 internet mail: preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com