How to group variants?

"Jon P. Knight" <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk> Thu, 16 March 1995 20:35 UTC

Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 20:09:04 +0000
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From: "Jon P. Knight" <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>
Subject: How to group variants?
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A quick question to all you IAFA hackers out there - are there any rules
for grouping variant fields in IAFA templates?  I assume that variant
fields with the same variant number after the ``-v'' are always supposed
to be a part of the same logical group.  In which case the numbering for
variant clusters should be different for unrelated clusters, right?  For
example in the DOCUMENT template type as Author-(USER*) and Admin-(USER*)
aren't really related but Language-v* and Format-v* are (probably), we'd have
something like: 

Author-Name-v1: Joe Bloggs
Author-Email-v1: joe@bloggs.com
Author-Name-v2: Andy Capp
Author-Email-v2: andy@capp.org
Admin-Name-v3: Fred Jones
Admin-Email-v3: F.Jones@here.edu
Admin-Name-v4: Bertie Bassett
Admin-Email-v4: bbassett@allsorts.gov
Language-v5: blah blah
Format-v5: related to blah blah
Language-v6: froop froop
Format-v6: depends on froop froop

Is this right?  The clusters must be marked as variants (ie: have the
-v<number> after the field name) otherwise one wouldn't know which email
address went with which name.  Are there any cases where variant clusters
_are_ related to other clusters or normal variant fields and so should
have the same numbering scheme?  If so, how does one workout from the
outline templates given in the I-Draft which ones these are? 

Cheers,

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
* It's not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important *

How to group variants? Jon P. Knight