When designing methods to translate EAD to HTML, Dynaweb stylesheets for
example, I find the did wrapper element to be useful.

Say we have this:
<C01 LEVEL="SERIES"><DID>
<UNITLOC LOCTYPE="CONTAINER" CONTAINERTYPE="BOX">1</UNITLOC>
<UNITTITLE>Correspondence, <UNITDATE TYPE="INCLUSIVE">1935-62</UNITDATE>
</UNITTITLE>
<PHYSDESC><EXTENT>(10 Folders)</EXTENT></PHYSDESC>
</DID>
<C02>...

And want it to display as ("bold" indicates display only, not tags):

Box 1
<bold>Correspondence, 1935-62 (10 Folders)</bold>

The eaisest way to do this when translating to html is to replace
<UNITTITLE> with <H2> (or B or whatever you want) and replace </DID> with
</H2>.  This always incorporates the physdesc, which may or may not be
included with each unittitle.  The did is really convienent in this
situation - it makes the conversion a simple replace operation and avoids
the programming steps which would be needed to achive the same result
without it (i.e. IF physdesc exists THEN close H2 after it ELSE close after
unittitle).
For this reason I'd be in favor of continuing to use it if it was made
optional.

Stephen Miller
Duke University Special Collections
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