Saturday, 2006-10-28, 9:00
SIGs: Overlap
Several SIGs met during this period: Presentation, Training, Ontologies, Overlap, and the heroic all-day HCI-Book. There’s some talk of reconvening Manuscripts via e-mail, perhaps for next year. I went to Overlap.
There weren’t many of us, but the discussion made a good stab at noting some tricky problems. Bruvik observed that the MENOTA guidelines offer a recommendation about handling overlap. (In the 2.0 beta version, one instance is here; given its relative simplicity, it’s not much of a recommendation.) Bauman commented that in LMNL, attributes can have attributes, and referenced (I think!) this paper‘s discussion of “Trojan milestones.” Kazushi expressed an interest in devising a formal language that addresses overlap.
With Schmidt’s copy of the draft P5 chapter on overlapping markup, we also talked about the difficulties of presenting examples in multiple languages. The current draft uses a German poem and an Italian one, IIRC. We were split (given the i18n project already underway) on whether a chapter of documentation in English should have examples in English, or whether a given chapter in any language could use examples in any language. Earlier forms of a language (e.g., the manuscript description module’s use of Middle English) may be harder for some readers than a different contemporary language, and balancing the desire for clarity and consistency was a wish not to create monolingual insulation.