Hi Bruce,

the problem here is that we need to be able to encode documents like

<p><span/><field-start/><span/><p> <p><span/><field-end/></p>

~Florian

I never weighed in on this suggestion of Florian's, in part because it relates to on-going discussions at the metadata SC, but since I recall there's some discussion of these suggestions going on now-ish ...

On Nov 20, 2006, at 11:03 AM, Florian Reuter wrote:

I think before we get specific about that, I'd agree we need one (or more) generic metadata fields.

The start/end approach seems potentially dangerous to me (how do you handle well-formedness if the field spans across the end of a content node?), but my more important concern is that the field (or at least one of them) consist of two distinct structures: structure and presentation. E.g. Daniel Vogelheim and I settled on a structure like this for the citation field:

field source body

If you're concerned about interop with OOXML, they also do something similar (though encode all of the "source" in a single attribute, which I think a bad design choice).