XStandoff supports discontinuous spans. This can be useful in a case such as the first lines of "Alice in Wonderland" which contain a discontinuous quote.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
Only one annotation level is used: the logical document structure containing both the paragraph (p) and the quote (q) elements. The example was first presented by C.M. Sperberg-McQueen and Claus Huitfeldt in their talk at Balisage 2008. The inline annotation "does not capture the intuitive sense the reader may have that the reported thoughts of Alice form a single continuous unitary utterance" (quotation taken from the above paper).
<p> Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, <q>and what is the use of a book,</q> thought Alice <q>without pictures or conversation?</q> </p>
The resulting XStandoff instance containing a single annotation layer. The quotation is annotated as a q element constructed by the disjoint segment seg4 which itself refers to the segments seg2 and seg3.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsf:corpusData xmlns:xsf="http://www.xstandoff.net/2009/xstandoff/1.1"
xmlns="http://www.xstandoff.net/2009/xstandoff/1.1"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.xstandoff.net/2009/xstandoff/1.1
http://www.xstandoff.net/2009/xstandoff/1.1/xsf.xsd" xml:id="alice">
<xsf:primaryData start="0" end="302">
<xsf:textualContent>Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was
reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book,"
thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"</xsf:textualContent>
</xsf:primaryData>
<xsf:segmentation>
<xsf:segment xml:id="seg1" type="char" start="0" end="302"/>
<xsf:segment xml:id="seg2" type="char" start="218" end="250"/>
<xsf:segment xml:id="seg3" type="char" start="266" end="302"/>
<xsf:segment xml:id="seg4" type="seg" segments="seg2 seg3" mode="disjoint"/>
</xsf:segmentation>
<xsf:annotation>
<xsf:level xml:id="alice-log">
<xsf:layer xmlns:log="http://www.xstandoff.net/alice/log"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.xstandoff.net/alice/log ../xsd/alice_log.xsd" priority="0">
<log:text xsf:segment="seg1">
<log:p xsf:segment="seg1">
<log:q xsf:segment="seg4"/>
</log:p>
</log:text>
</xsf:layer>
</xsf:level>
</xsf:annotation>
</xsf:corpusData>