> Your example suggests, though doesn't assert, that the sequential model
> would be the ordinary reading sequence. Here's another example:
> the book has within it several paths (selections from
> the contents), which I want to indicate by BEGIN-->NEXT-->END markup.
> Now I know I could use PATH/NODE for this purpose (in which case
> perhaps we don't need both PATH/NODE and BEGIN/END). But if I
> did mark up paths with BEGIN>END, then the BEGIN wouldn't necessarily
> be the TOP of the entire document (the book).
This is exactly the approach taken by Hiltz & Turoff in their book
"The Network Nation" (1st edition '78, revised '93). They encourage
readers with different interests (social vs. computer scientist
for example) to read subsets of the book AND their preface provides
the suggested reading order for each of four pathes. I have
refered many people to this book over the years and all have
appreciated this effort on the part of the authors. Only one
example so I suppose one shouldn't generalize but it can work.
Dave Morris