MultiBert EndSets

[Marc Stiegler <marcs>]

Precis: The inclusion list makes it easy, and inevitable, that 
people will create endsets for which there is no single bert 
that contains the entire endset. As nearly as I can tell, the 
current document design assumes a single containing bert. Do 
we have a problem here?
----

Ever since the discussion of embedded and standalone links, I've 
fired an occasional neuron worrying about the bert context mechanism 
for picking an endset, and its possible failures (starting 
with my desire to remember the bert of the inclusion list which 
was the context for a referenced document, so that when the link 
to the referenced document is traversed, we get not merely the 
document itself, but also the inclusion list it was  being viewed 
within at the time of link creation).

Well, there's a more problematic case out there. Let us open 
an inclusion list that references several documents. The user 
selects a big chunk--a chunk so big that it encompasses a couple 
of the referenced documents. He calls this an endset and runs 
a link to it.

What's the bert context? My first reaction is that the bert context 
is the inclusion list, but the references are not contained in 
the inclusion list (using the exact, xanalogical meaning of the 
term "contain"). What we really have here is a single bert that 
is referencing several other berts, and it's this group of other 
berts that we ran the link to. Are there any problems in this 
situation? 

If the user selects several noncontiguous pieces, out of several 
different referenced documents,  rather than selecting a wholesale 
collection of whole documents, are there any additional problems 
with that?

--marcs