For discussion: Ordering should not be meaningful, complex constraints will make this hard to adopt

[ptsefton]

Not sure about the logic behind having stuff like this: "The first element child of the article element must be an h1 heading that serves as the primary title for the document. It may itself contain markup. "

this makes parsing much more complicted than simply using RDFa. It would be much more robust to require said title to have an RDFa property. But in any case this requirement that " The white-space-normalised text value of the h1 must appear as a substring of the white-space-normalised text value of the title element." is going to be (a) complex to validate and (b) hard to author.

I suggest that it would be much better to have explicit document semantics for all the important elements, and not rely on constraints like "The first section child element of the article must be the Authors and Affiliations section. It has no typeof ".

If ordering is that important and all the important sections such as the Authors and affiliates sections are marked up then software can re-order them for publication, right?

[darobin]

I don't disagree that some of those rules can be relaxed, and should be if it is possible. But I don't believe that the goal is to live completely in RDF-land here (otherwise using HTML is not needed). Order does in fact matter.

I'm happy to remove some of those constraints though. For A&A maybe we could simply type it @sballesteros?

The match between h1 and title probably ought to be a SHOULD. I mostly added it out of annoyance with publishers who just put the name of the journal in the title, making history useless. It's not that hard to validate:

let norm = str => String(str).trim().replace(/\s+/g, ' ');
let valid = norm(document.title).indexOf(norm(document.querySelector('article:first-of-type > h1:first').textContent)) === 0;

Regarding hard-to-author note that the goals explicitly state that while it will be done where possible, it is secondary to interoperability through simplified processing. Easy authoring would have author-friendly formats target SH as an output. That's the topic of issue #26. It's something I have quite a bit of experience with that I think could be really nice in this case.

Leaving open to hash out specific parts that could be de-constrained.