On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 10:44:50 -0700, "Karen Coyle" <[log in to unmask]>
said:

> Language distinctions make sense in some areas, like in subject headings
> when there are subject heading schemes in different languages.

And, just to understand where this is all coming from: in citations.

The question came up on the Open Office bib list from a natural
scientist, who explained that the journals he submits to require that
taxa names (species) names in titles be rendered differently. His
suggestion was to allow an <i> or <em> tag, to which I strenuously
objected. Likewise, allowing domain-specific tags like <species> is
hugely unrealistic.

The span class with type and xml:lang attributes seemed the only possibly
workable solution to me. You're right that you introduce yet another
complication for cataloguing rules, but where Doug and I are coming from
is of course a little different place. For me it's pretty clear when
there's a quote in a title, or a species name (and I already have to edit
records I import from MARC sources because they are not coded correctly
for my needs).

In my own work, I'd only ever use the markup to indicate quotes. Why,
because what happens if I have this title in my MODS record:

   A title with a "quote"

... and the citation style mandates I put quotes around the title?

Again, I realize these needs are not the primary focus of MODS, but I
wonder if there isn't some use for something like this in the library
community too. When I bounced the idea off Rebecca a few weeks, she'd
mentioned another request someone had registered to have paragraph tags
in notes, so that HTML transformation was better supported. This also
seems reasonable to me...

Bruce

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