New agenda item for the november conference call

[Christian Wittern]

Dear list members,

I would like to suggest another agenda item for the council in its
capacity as the TEI core workgroup.  

In the reports of the workgroups at MM2 in Chicago, and also in the
discussions of the migration WG immediately after that, it became
clear (at least to me) that there are some architectural decisions
that have to be made on the road to P5.  It would make the work of
these WG's much easier if some of these decisions could be made in a
timely way. What I have in mind here are the following issues, but
this is just from my own perspective, whereas the problem area is
clearly much larger:

- Can we expect entities to be available in P5?  
  Background:  The various XML schema languages have to my knowledge
  decided to abandon entities.  What to we do?  (My concern is here
  more with the TEI 'user space', as opposed to the use of entities
  internal to DTD processing, which probably would not be affected.)
  One of the many areas affected would be "Section 6.2 Treatment of
  Punctuation", which will need some revision anyway. 

- Should/could  P5 limit the content of attribute values to tokens
  (and similar material) as opposed to the many attribute values in
  P4, which allow essentially the same content as in PCDATA.
  Background:  Attribute values are different from PCDATA in that they
  can not contain other markup constructs.  This makes it impossible,
  for example, to specify language, writing system, readings and the
  like for the content of attribute values.  Additionally, there is some area of
  conflict between XML:lang and language specification in  TEI, which
  could be cleared up as well.  
  To make this possible, things like 
  <corr sic="foo">bar</corr> would have to be expressed as
  <seg>
     <corr>bar</corr>
     <sic>foo</sic>
  </seg> 
  Since this would require a considerable change to the architecture
  of TEI and the view of its underlying text (which could not be
  considered to be 'simply a concetanation of all #PCDATA in a
  document', I would appreciate a statement from the council on this. 
  

<p>All the best,

Christian Wittern

<p><p>
-- 

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