> From: "Weibel,Stu" <[log in to unmask]>
> Would someone volunteer to write a Recommended Best Practice note for
> delimiting multiple values in a an element field?
Remember the old user guide, now rather out of date?
It described a semi-colon convention that
(a) equated repeated values with repeated element assignment statements,
(b) applied to all elements, and
(c) defined a quoting mechanism for including literal semi-colons as data.
To paraphrase in modern parlance the Sept 1996 draft:
= Any metadata element may be omitted or repeated. As a shorthand for
= repeated elements, one element can share its name part with a second
= element by appending a `;' (semi-colon) and the content of the second
= to the content of the first. So the first two lines below are
= equivalent to the third line.
=
= <META name="DC.Creator" content="Marx, K">
= <META name="DC.Creator" content="Engels, F">
= <META name="DC.Creator" content="Marx, K; Engels, F">
=
= Use a backslash, as in ``\;'', if you want to include a literal
= semi-colon in the content. To include a literal double-quote (`"') in
= this metadata [HTML] notation, write it as %22. Within a descriptive
= record, element order has no shared meaning, but for repeated elements
= the relative order (e.g., among multiple creators) should be preserved
= by display software.
-John
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