The page, say Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor "is the constant presence, directly encountered, in the otherwise insubstantial engagement with the mirage of the book. ... Yet despite its importance, and probably because of its familiarity, the page itself has remained relatively unexamined." (3) And, we might add, relatively unencoded as a content object in its own right. In most TEI-encoded documents the sequence of material surface areas that carry content is subsidiary to the content's logical structure, and for codices the page structure exists only latently via milestone elements. ¹ This abstraction of textual content from the physical makeup of the item is supported not only by the influential "ordered hierarchy of content objects" model of text but also by the fact that, historically, there has been little *determinate* relation between a generic document type (eg. an invoice, a prayer, a chronicle) and the spatial structure of the medium carrying it. The roll, of course, has no separate surfaces so "pagination" was up to the scribe; and as much as the codex form affected readers' interaction with content in general ² , presentational features that specifically exploit the properties of the codex page are used to draw attention to the content, not to the page qua page. ³

But in the daily newspaper, one of the world's commonest document types, the factors of constant physical encounter and extreme familiarity reinforce each other so much that the page moves to the fore, disrupting the traditional notion of logical structure. The great paradox of newspapers is that their content, though important, is *transiently* important. The only constant of the reader's newspaper experience is that each day a sequence of page spaces is made available and content is distributed throughout those spaces in a way that respects the reader's experience of the space sequence just as much as it respects the nature of the content. "Predictable content [...]," says Harold Evans, "should be in predictable positions;" (51) and he adds that "[...] where unpredictable news ... is organised in departments (foreign, sport, business, etc.) these should appear in approximately the same position in the newspaper every day. The space will vary ... but *the page should not change from day to day*." (51, emphasis added). The reader comes to an issue of the paper expecting an experience that is literally and conceptually shaped by pages she knows she will encounter: the front page, the back page, the arts page, the editorial page, and so on. Those exact same page spaces re-appear for her each morning: the exact same content never does.

Thus the daily newspaper fundamentally challenges the default TEI model of textual structure. Encoding each physical page as an empty element misrepresents its function and the nature of the document as a whole. It makes no sense to talk of logical structure versus physical structure here because in the page-by-page organization of the content where each page, like a player in a sports team, has a particular role and is 'followed' by readers, there is a communicative structure that transcends any such distinction.

References

• Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of reading in the West. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1999 (First published in France as Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental, 1995.)
• Cormack, Bradin and Carla Mazzio. Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Library.
• Evans, Harold. Newspaper Design. Book Five of Editing and Design: A Five-volume Manual of English, Typography and Layout. London: Heinemann. Second Edition 1976.
• Manguel, Alberto. Turning the Page, in Stoicheff and Taylor, 27-35.
• Roberts, Colin H. and T. C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. London: for The British Academy by Oxford University Press. 1983.
• Stoicheff, Peter and Andrew Taylor, eds. The Future of the Page. Studies in Book and Print Culture. General Ed. Leslie Howsam. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2004.