I think John's presentation is a little inaccurate in some respects. It may be
that my memory is faulty, however.

In message <ygf4qmqb812.fsf@chwpb.local> Christian Wittern <
> I am writing to ask for your advice, and possibly your help. The
> Sanskrit workgroup has been running for many months now, but I have no
> sense that we are making any progress. It has so far happened twice
> that the group have agreed on a particular approach which I have
> written up and submitted to the Council, and that the Council has then
> found problems with it and suggested significant changes.

Yes, that is the way the Council works. 

> 
> In the telephone discussion at the beginning of June, Lou Burnard was
> the chief speaker (apart from myself); on that occasion he suggested
> replacing my <sequence> and <segment> tags with a solution based on
> the existing tag <seg>; <choice> also came up again. Since then I have
> made an attempt to discuss these points with him directly: I wrote to
> him pointing out that the definition of <seg> is too narrow to permit
> the various kinds of language-specific markup that we would need, but
> he has lapsed into silence.
> 

In fact I telephoned him a month or so ago to try to understand the grounds of
his objection to the <choice>+<seg> combination. I did not succeed in getting a
clear understanding of the grounds for his objections, which may well be my
fault. But it is not true to say that I have "lapsed into silence". It is also
very strange to hear someone say that the definition of seg is "too narrow"
--usually the objection is the reverse.

> I find this very frustrating. There are Council members on the
> workgroup, and it would make much more sense if they raised their
> objections to the approaches we are developing in the workgroup's own
> discussions, rather than conducting a parallel debate elsewhere.

I agree that it would be very good to see the debate carried on properly,
whether it is on the workgroups private list, on the TEI sourceforge site or
elsewhere. I have not seen any debate as such though: John produced a proposal,
which the Council commented on at its last meeting. I haven't seen any public
attempt to address the concerns since then. I have had private conversations
with both John (as I mentioned above) and also with Felix Sasaki, but those are
not the same as public debate, which I entirely agree is lacking on this as on
many other matters which the CXouncil needs to discuss.


 As
> things stand, it appears that we are having an endlessly prolonged
> and inconclusive debate.
> 
> Do you think there is anything that can be done to improve matters? As
> I have said before, Raymond Doctor and I have a piece of software to
> write. To be more precise, the development of this software is
> currently stalled while the developers await the details of the XML
> markup that it will use. We came to the TEI because we wanted that
> markup to be "standard", but we both now feel that unless the
> discussion can be brought to a conclusion fairly soon, it will be
> better for us to pull out and go ahead with a "home-made" solution. Do
> you think you can help us avoid this undesirable outcome?
> 
> Best wishes,
> John Smith
> 
> --
> Dr J. D. Smith               *  john.smith@oriental.cam.ac.uk
> Faculty of Oriental Studies  *  http://bombay.oriental.cam.ac.uk
> Sidgwick Avenue              *  Tel. 01223 335140
> Cambridge CB3 9DA            *  Fax  01223 335110
> 
> -- 
> 
>  Christian Wittern 
>  Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
>  47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN
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