[osis-core] OTCite: final call

[Patrick Durusau]

Greetings!

Had an interesting conversation with Troy yesterday on the problem of 
text in the NT that is not a quotation in the modern sense of word for 
word reporting of a passage but is in the opinion of the translator, a 
paraphrase of an OT text. The goal is to encode those words so that they 
can be selected for distinct rendering. (A note could be supplied with 
an osisRef with string range to specify the passage but that would be 
more complicated than the <q> solution with an attribute.)

For those who are interested, TEI dealt with the similar problem with an 
<interp> element that used a to and from attribute to record similar 
information.

Note that the <cite> element in XHTML is inappropriate as the spec 
equates reference and cite as in making a reference to the title of a 
work, or in the words of the standard:

> The cite element contains a citation or a reference to other sources.

I don't read "other sources" as being a paraphrase.

To be used in the OT context, <cite> would be more appropriate for:

Numbers 21

14 Therefore it is said in the book of the <cite>Wars of Yahweh</cite>, 
Vaheb in Suphah, The valleys of the Arnon,

Assuming we interpret, Wars of Yahweh, to be the actual title, I would 
mark the quote as starting at the end of the <cite> element but I am not 
certain that I would agree with the RSV's ending of the quotation (that 
is how it is marked in typography) at the end of verse 15.

Still, I agree with Troy that it is a problem that we don't have a good 
mechanism to deal with at the moment.

On the other hand, I am extremely reluctant to add a new element and 
content model to deal with this admittedly important issue.

At present Troy is marking these with <seg> which does avoid default 
rendering for <q> from rendering these passages as quotes. That solution 
still requires processing of the attribute for rendering but does avoid 
any default formatting based upon the material being in a <q> element.

My preference would be to specify levels of OSIS conformant processing 
and say that you have to take attributes into account for a particular 
level of OSIS processing. That would allow the use of our <q> element 
for these passages with an attribute to specify that it is not a quote 
in the modern sense.

Troy resists that solution and I think at this point the best option we 
can offer is for him to continue to use <seg> as he does now. I don't 
really think attribute based processing is all that problematic (I 
appreciate the Lockman editor's concern but think it is misplaced) but 
then I don't mind attribute based grammars either, so my judgment in 
that regard may be suspect.

Comments?

Hope everyone is at the start of a great week!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!