conference call (fwd)

[Christian Wittern]

Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> writes:

>> 
>> If the council asks me to do so, I will try to follow up.  Currently,
>> most of our work is mentally geared towards P5; we have not
>> continued to deal with P4.
>
> the assumption behind my proposed timetable for P5 was that
> we would issue one or more P4.1 supplements in early 2003,
> one of which would be the new character encoding stuff. I think
> the members really want to read something about this before
> the end of 2003, which is the soonest P5 might see the light
> of day.

Well, we have substantially revised Chapter 4 for P4.  While this
might not be optimal, it is IMHO improved over P3.  The problem we, as
the Charset WG have with further amending and revising P4 is that P4
caters to both SGML and XML communities, which means we can not assume
Unicode to be the common reference.  This makes it extremely difficult
to present the material in a way that is useful for novice text
encoders.  

P5 on the other hand does not promise SGML compatibility last I heard,
so we are on firmer ground here.  On our agenda for the meeting and
the coming months is now basically Chapter 25, the WSD mechanism.
User feedback suggest that this is also in dire need of revision.  We
are currently thinking of splitting the WSD in some submodules and
integrate it in the main TEI DTD.  This will require major changes in
the whole concept, but hopefully make it easier to use, so that it
actually gets used.

Having said that, I haste to add that I am the last to
refuse revising P4 and its charset chapter, if I am pointed to
problematic passages.  (Dont say the whole thing is problematic, I
know that already, but that is largely a consequence of somebody, who
can not dance trying to dancing on both SGML and XML parties). 
Anyway, I will add this to the agenda for the Tuebingen meeting.

All the best,

Christian


-- 

 Christian Wittern 
 Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
 47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN