Regarding point (3), I feel one of the cleanest aspects of the MADS draft is that everything authoritative, and only that, is the content of <authority>. The program or stylesheet logic to get the "guts" of the authority record is trivial, and that's a good thing. It's also nice (when, e.g. editing XML documents or viewing unstyled XML) to have the guts occupy one region of the computer screen, not intermingled with secondary, non-authoritative information.

Regarding point (4), <role> is used in name+title combination authority records to represent the same metadata as in MODS. A person's role in the more general sense would go in <fieldOfActivity>.

>>> [log in to unmask] 2004-06-10 11:46:59 >>>
On Mon, 7 Jun 2004 09:29:05 -0700, "Bruce D'Arcus" <[log in to unmask]>
said:

> Also, I think name handling is the weakest part of MODS.  I think I sent
> Rebecca some comments on this privately, but dońt have them handy (am
> travelling).

3)  Make variant a full element, perhaps contrasted with "primary" or
some such, and wrap it in whatever structure it is, um, varying.

4) remove role from the name, because it is representing separate
metadata (all the more awkward when you take this structure out of mods
into something more general like mads).