I've had the following open action item for quite a while now -

Mike to reconsider the annotation problem and post his thoughts.

Today I went back and looked at what I originally proposed[1] (RFE 574880[2] -- it's been around two years ago now) and have reconsidered it.

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200204/msg00006.html

[2] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=574880&group_id=21935&atid=384107

My thoughts after reconsidering it are that there's nothing I would change from what I originally proposed. If we were to add an Annotation element to DocBook, I can't see it being significantly different from what is described in that proposal.

Part of what I proposed was that the Annotation element should be a child of the element it annotates; for example:

<acronym>FYI<annotation class="expansion">For Your Information</annotation></acronym>

<foreignphrase>caveat emptor<annotation >Latin phrase usually translated as "Let the buyer beware".</annotation></foreignphrase>

That would make it different from the Footnote element, which is simply a marker at some point in a document that doesn't clearly indicate what part of the document it's intended to annotate. (That is, it's not clear whether it's annotating the word that precedes it or the phase/sentence/ paragraph or whatever.)

To my recollection, it was concerns about that part of the proposal that stalled our original discussion about adding the element. But as far as I remember, those concerns had to do with processing expectations, not with the content model itself.

Anyway, if those concerns are going to prevent us from ever considering adding the element, then I would like to reluctantly suggest that we talk about having it instead be something like the Footnote element -- just a marker, without any means to unambiguously indicate exactly what it's annotating. Like this:

<acronym>FYI</acronym><annotation class="expansion">For Your Information</annotation>

<foreignphrase>caveat emptor</foreignphrase><annotation >Latin phrase usually translated as "Let the buyer beware".</annotation>

That's it.

--Mike