Karin has provided an excellent supplementary XML file containing two <listPerson>, elements, one tagged as "historical" and one as "modern", containing details of all individuals associated with the MS and the project. This will enable me to provide full details of any individual from any point in the text where a <name> tag shows up.

In order to make this work, each <name> tag in the transcription document will have to be given a key attribute pointing at the xml:id of the <person> tag which contains the information for that person. There are 363 name tags in the document, so this is no small task.

It's a little complicated by the fact that <name> tags occur within discursive text, and typically contain some of the information that the <person> tag has. For instance, consider this code block:

<bibl>
   <title type="incipit">I may well say with Ioyfull harte</title>, attributed to 
  <name type="personal">
    <reg>Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, 1515-1542</reg>
  </name>, on her marriage to 
  <name type="personal">
    <reg>Thomas Howard, Lord, 1512-1537 </reg>
  </name> by 
  <name type="personal">
   <reg>R.G. Siemens</reg>
  </name>.
</bibl>

It's straightforward to add the key attributes (DOUGLAS, THOMAS_HOWARD, and RGS respectively), but we have to decide whether the inline discursive information contained in the <reg> element, which in two cases includes honorific and date information, should be left as it is. The idea of centralizing the person information is that it can be updated in one place. Therefore, it would make sense to remove all that information, and replace it with a simple tag like this:

<name key="DOUGLAS">
 Margaret Douglas
</name>

The name would then be turned into a link; mousing over it would pop up some simple info (full name and dates?), while clicking on it would show a larger popup with full details of the person.

I don't see that we need the type="personal" designation -- can anyone see a value in it? The fact that the key attribute points to a <person> tag makes that information clear.

Does this make sense? Although it may take some time to make all the changes to the transcription document, I'll need to know how the changes will be made in order to write my code to link names to the info in the person lists.