There are two things a non-JATS user might find of interest in how we addressed this new requirement in JATS:
a mechanism for adding significant functionality to a existing tag set without burdening existing users, and
some of the requirements for multilingual documents.
The days when every markup project started with the development of a bespoke vocabulary are far behind us. Shared vocabularies dominate markup applications, often vocabularies that are long lived and used by a wide variety of users. The proponents of many of these vocabularies have evangelical tendencies; they want more and more users to adopt their vocabulary, and in order to make that possible they continually enrich the vocabulary both to better meet the needs of current users and to meet the needs of possible future users. It is important to do this is in ways that do not sabotage the utility of the vocabulary for current users.
Writers in so-called “minority languages”, writers who often find that it is useful to use multiple languages to communicate, are gaining traction. More and more of them are rejecting the premise that in order to publish they must use one of the majority languages as must their readers.
While it seems unlikely that other communities will find that the structures JATS developed to meet this need will be exactly what they need, we hope that others will find our analysis helpful as you figure out how to accommodate these new requirements and new users.