At 11:41 AM 3/29/02 -0500, Geoff Mottram wrote:
>I would like to propose an alternative declaration for the name, subject
>and title elements that tackles the various issues raised with the
>current implementation. It requires the general design philosophy that
>if an element may contain sub-elements, it should not also contain
>regular content.

I actually agree with this rather strongly as a general design principle.
Though we deal with many schemes (including EAD) that do allow mixed PCDATA
and subelements, implementation is much easier if you do not allow it.


>----------
>NAME FIELD
>----------
>For the name field, I propose renaming it to "creator" with the
>following structure:

I also like the redesign of name.  I also like not calling it "name", so we
don't have the ambiguity with names as subjects.  However, I would prefer
to call it "contributor".  A lot of names in 1xx and 7xx fields will not be
creators of the intellectual content.

>----------
>UNIVERSAL FIELD
>----------
>A final possibility would be to create a single field definition for
>creators, subjects and titles as follows:
>
>creatorSubjectTitleType
>        ID (attribute)
>        role (attribute)
>        authority (attribute)
>        link (attribute)
>        typeAuthority (attribute)
>        typeLink (attribute)
>
>        affiliation (element)
>        displayForm (element)
>        part (element)
>                type (attribute)
>        description (element)
>        type (element)

I don't like this, as we're getting very far from MARC semantics, the
representation of which I thought was the purpose of MODS.

p