Kevin Thiele wrote:

...

I seem to be in a minority of one here again, but I'll continue to argue my case for a bit longer.

Go for it. Defensiveness is a waste of everyone's time.

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2. If we can effectively embed fully parsable data in a natural-language

paragraph, why not?

Jim Croft wrote:

becasue it creates mixed content (legal, but evil) where the data is parsable, but not structured.

[...]

In fact, DELTA already does this sort of thing by allowing liberal appending and prepending <freeform comments> all over the place. While this makes for quasireadable descriptions, authors often embed interesting character data in the comments making it unusable by other applications, even within the DELTA suite. [...]

These <freeform comments> are natural-language paragraphs embedded in otherwise fully parsable data, which is the opposite of Kevin's case above. And much easier to handle, I think.

I put interesting data in the comments for an extremely important reason: I know I don't have enough data to represent the probable diversity in the taxon (the item), and I do not want to understate the diversity. Better to leave the character coded as unknown, but record the data. At some point in the future, the data can be moved from the comments to where it belongs.

-- Una Smith

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mailstop K-710, Los Alamos, NM 87545