This is the mail archive of the
docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
mailing list for the DocBook project.
Re: Issues with processing expectations of the proposedannotation element
- From: Paul Grosso <pgrosso at arbortext dot com>
- To: Jason Foster <jafoster at uwaterloo dot ca>, docbook at lists dot oasis-open dot org
- Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 09:30:20 -0500
- Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Issues with processing expectations of the proposedannotation element
- References: <4.3.2.7.2.20020625162015.03b89bf8@172.27.10.30>
At 09:09 2002 06 26 -0400, Jason Foster wrote:
><snip/>
>
>Would a marginalia be considered an annotation?
Since "annotation" is a logical concept and "marginalia"
is (at least as used here) a presentation, it is certainly
the case that one could want to present an annotation as
a marginalia [a marginalium?], but...
>In textbooks a (somewhat) common layout is to divide the page into two columns (65%,35%?) where the inside columns contain the full text and the outside columns contain a paragraph-by-paragraph summary. A while back Norm described this as marginalia, and I would be tickled pink if it became a part of DocBook (and the FO stylesheets!)
>
>Jason Foster
...defining precisely how marginalia should be formatted
and being able to support them in composition systems is
very difficult.*
In particular, neither XSL 1.0 nor CSS supports marginalia.
Hence I did not consider the possibility of marginalia when
I outlined the processing expectation issues of the proposed
annotation element. But thanks for bringing it up, at least
as an issue.
paul
* Marginalia are floating constucts which are already tricky,
but they are further complicated by the fact that their
composed locations are supposed to be vertically aligned
with their anchor in the flowing text. Not only is this
hard to do at best, but it's not even easy to define. For
example: what is the proper alignment when you have two
marginalia on the same word?; what do you do when marginalia
anchored near the bottom of the page won't all fit on that
page?; what happens when the anchors for two marginalia are
closer together than the height of the first marginalia?, etc.