🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9207202246.AA15855@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, DRMACRO@RALVM13.VNET.IBM.COM ("Dr. "Eliot Kimber" Macro") writes:
>As a friendly challenge and an educational experience for me, I
>challenge you to present here data expression methods you think SGML
>documents cannot express and I will define ways of expressing them.  A
>six pack of my finest homebrew (or reasonable alternative should you
>not be a beer drinker) says I can't be stumped.  Either way we'll
>all learn something valuable.

  Well, let's try an example and see what happens:

  I have a text of some length that contains many elements that overlap.  
I want you to find a way to tag the document so that the tags demarcate 
all the possible intersections of the elements.  For example:

	<X>now is the <Y>time</X> for all good men</Y>

  This tagging shows an X and a Y element that overlap only for "time", 
but have their own content otherwise (X is "now is the time", and Y
is "time for all good men").  If it helps, think of yourself describing 
a Venn diagram and all its possible intersections.

  What I want you to do is tell me how you would mark up such a document 
where the number of overlapping components is n.  Note that the number of 
possible intersections is 2**n - 1.  And to count as "expressed by SGML",
the description must be within what SGML can enforce; if the DTD permits
some other reasonable interpretation of the document, you lose.

-Darrell.