[tei-council] [John Smith <john.smith at oriental.cam.ac.uk>] End of word

[Christian Wittern]

Edward Vanhoutte <edward.vanhoutte at kantl.be> writes:

> neither can I
> 
> Edward
> 
> Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> wrote :
> 
> > I cannot see anything attached

Strange things happens in this summer heat.  Trying again, this time
with good old cut&paste:

From: John Smith <john.smith at oriental.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: End of word
To: Christian Wittern <wittern at kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
cc: Raymond Doctor <dictdoc at hotmail.com>,
   John Smith <john.smith at oriental.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:03:58 +0100 (BST)

Dear Christian,

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.

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.

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. 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 at 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