This mechanism will look very familiar to old-timers in the markup community. Using a bundle of attributes to attach information to document structures that can govern processing is at the heart of SGML's “architectural forms”. Architectural forms are key to HyTime and DITA, and have been used in many other markup environments.

While the JATS multi-language structures do not use architectural forms as defined in the 1990s, their design was heavily influenced by them. (Most of the publications about SGML architectural forms are no longer available. The best reference we have found that is available is “A Reader's Guide to the HyTime Standard” [[HyTime]].