Hello!
> The MODS Editorial Committee has discussed this request.
Thanks for this information!
> note type="statement of responsibility". Doesn't this help?
Of course it helps! I would prefer something more unambiguous, though.
Let's assume we want to code an XSLT to retrieve from a collection all
items with an "at al.". Such an XSLT would need to be written to parse
every note type="statement of responsibility" and try to interpret whether
it bears the semantics of "at al.". Such an XSLT would also need to search
for bogus names, parsing the contents of names to try to find out whether
one of them contains "et al.". And what if an author would happen to be
called "et al" as a own name? Such an XSLT would furthermore need to parse
description elements under name to try to find any "et al.". Trying to
consistently avoid these ambiguities, I could imagine a (possibly empty)
name element with a @type="etal" attribute:
name type="etal"
> input in the desired order, [...] we can't assure that they will remain that way in XML.
XML compliant software should never take for granted that elements are not
ordered. Of course, we can never assure the XML compliance's of a third
parts' software.
> a proposal to define a sequencing attribute.
This could probably be useful if such an attribute is able to code more
than just the sequencing. Let's consider an item, where the names of the
five authors are written on two lines: three of the names are written with
a large font size on the first line and two names are written with a small
font size on the second line. In such a case, a sequencing attribute would
need to code for the fact that the names are splitted into two groups. An
alternative would be to create a new element tentatively called
"nameGroup" (or similar) possibly with an attribute coding for the grounds
on which the grouping is done.
Regards!
SaaĊĦha,
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