Re: [xml-dev] XPointer string functions -- abandoned?

[ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)]

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Piotr Bañski writes:

> My question is: how 'exotic' (or plainly thoughtless) are we in relying
> on the development of, and support for, XPointer technology for the
> description of linguistic resources?

Relying on the stability of the semantics of XPointer makes perfectly
good sense -- if it enables you to describe your data in useful ways,
via a dependence on XPointer semantics, go for it.

As for expecting implementations of . . . well, what, exactly?  A
version of XInclude which supports full XPointer [1]?  Not likely, as
I'm not aware of any impetus towards extending the XInclude
specification in that way.

With my NLP hat on I'm a big fan of standoff markup, and we use it
extensively in our work at Edinburgh [2].  But our experience has been
that it's virtually always worth building up from a version of the
data which is tokenised at the lowest level we're ever likely to care
about, rather than trying to point into runs of text. . .

If that's ruled out because of the sheer scale of your data, or
copyright restrictions, or whatever, then you can achieve the same
effect by targetting your standoff at a virtual document, which is the
_output_ of a tokeniser on your raw data.

ht

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xptr
[2] http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/sgmleu97.html
- -- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
                         Half-time member of W3C Team
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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