🚀 go-pugleaf

My question is no doubt naive, because I'm a newcomer to SGML.

I'm curious to know how change bars should be handled in a
politically-correct SGML manner. I have three remarks to make:

1 -- Maybe change bars should *not* be handled at an SGML level.
One could argue, after all, that they have nothing to do with the
intrinsic contents and structure of a document. Most often, they
appear in printed documents merely to indicate differences between
the current version and the previous one. I suppose we could imagine
an author-friendly SGML-to-LaTeX translator, say, that would handle
this change-bar problem in one way or another...

2 -- Since it is feasible that a change bar might start in the
middle of a subsection in chapter N, and extend to the middle of a
section in chapter N+1, there is an overlapping problem. The
<change> element could be implemented, of course, at the level of
sentences or paragraphs. But this would mean that authors would have
to use the <change> tag for every new sentence or paragraph that they
write, maybe for pages on end.

3 -- All that a typesetting system (such as LaTeX) needs in order to
produce a change bar is a BEGIN-BAR marker indicating where the
print-change-bar process is to be turned on, and an END-BAR marker
indicating where it is to be turned off, Maybe, then, we should
simply create two elements in SGML:

     <!ELEMENT beginbar - O EMPTY >
     <!ELEMENT endbar   - O EMPTY >

These elements would be employed at the sentence level. The obvious
flaw is that there is no verification at the SGML level that the
markers occur as valid <beginbar>/<endbar> pairs. This verification
could be handled easily, of course, by an SGML-to-LaTeX translator.

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