Re: div and p

Hi James and all,

Been watching this conversation as a more-or-less outsider to the topic, 
but now I can't help but wonder: are you guys talking about some 
universal property of text, which, one would think, is a creation of the 
amazing human mind, capable of calculating the changing distance between 
stars and counting angels spinning on the tip of a boson, and, at the 
same time -- you seem to be saying -- incapable of conceiving a textual 
structure where a few well-rounded sections are bracketed with several 
paragraphs on both ends? Old Plato sends you his love, I'm sure, but 
we've been through postmodernism and are out of his cave by now... ;-)

Legacy is legacy, and a glorified kludge is still a kludge, so let's not 
pretend 80/20 % is 100/0... 80/20 is often enough of a reason to shut 
one's eyes and swallow the pill, for the good of the system.

(And if 80/20 is not enough of a reason, then shrug and edit the ODD... 
Seriously: at this point, the ODD becomes an interpretive manifesto, 
potentially much stronger and far-reaching than a single e-mail thread.)

I recall the momentary feeling of terror that I experienced at the most 
recent TEI-MM when someone in all seriousness mentioned OHCO as an axiom 
of their current theorising (it was almost as strong as my dismay two 
years ago in Lyon, when I heard someone citing a 30-year-old example of 
overlapping <s> and <q> as a new discovery -- but I digress). Without 
the old observations and the simple(r) theories/models formulated years 
ago, we wouldn't be now where we are -- because simplification + 
iterative tinkering is the right strategy to deal with complexity -- but 
why claim that there is anything universal about them. I'm not arguing 
that the content model of div should necessarily get loosened, but let's 
recognize it for what it is, an 80/20 strategy, which in this case is 
possibly also roughly 90 % intellectual and 10 % pragmatic, and it's 
good that Paul teaches and discusses kludges, that's the pragmatic way 
to deal with the issue.

Best regards,

   Piotr



On 01/12/2017 04:45 PM, James Cummings wrote:
> On 12/01/17 15:33, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>> And … what are the typographic signals that indicate that the
>> paragraphs in question are part of the higher-level division but
>> not part of the immediately preceding subdivision, and not part
>> of a new subdivision of its own?
>
> I tend to agree with you in this recurrent discussion.  None of the
> examples I've seen convince me that they are not additional
> sub-divisions (perhaps without a head) or part of a new division (also
> maybe without a head).  In Lou's Canterbury tale-esque example I would
> say that a that the prologue and comments after are both separate
> sub-divisions (as is the body of the tale) to a division consisting of 3
> child divs.
>
> In Marjorie's case I think the problem is not that her extra concluding
> paragraph isn't a new division or some section, but that she doesn't
> want it signalled with a heading.  With Paul's examples I would choose
> solution 1 or 4 depending on whether I thought they were a concluding
> subdivision (sans heading) or a separate section (sans heading).
>
> There are plenty of texts that one might break into sections and
> divisions not because of typographical aspects of the text, but the
> content of it.  I don't necessarily see a direct relationship between an
> intellectual division and the format of how something originally
> appeared on a bit of scrapped animal skin or the side of a pot.
>
> -James
>