[tei-council] proposal: call for stylesheets

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Julia Flanders wrote:

>
> There's also the possibility that making this a sort of community 
> project would motivate people to make and share improvements on the 
> most promising samples. ("perfect, if only it did XYZ...")
>
> So I wasn't imagining that people would whip up a stylesheet just for 
> the competition, but that they would take something they already have 
> and document and/or polish it for sharing purposes.

If I wear my open source hat, I don't think this is very efficient way 
to proceed. If we end up with 10 stylesheets
by 10 different people, written in 10 different coding styles, covering 
10 different areas of the TEI,
with 10 different copyright notices, what then? How do you compare them? 
Who are the judges?
It would be much better for people to join in a single community project 
and contribute according to their ability,
I think.

I stress the issue of licensing. If a stylesheet written by A N Other is 
posted on the TEI web site,
it needs an open source license to be of practical uses to other 
projects. Better, the copyright would
be donated to the TEI, so that we can guard the IPR for future generations.

Since I didn't take part in the conversation, I find it hard to 
understand what people were thinking
they really wanted here.  The minutes say "Council discussed the problem 
of SR's style-sheets and the dichotomy
that they serve both as an example and what the TEI itself uses".  I 
suggest that this dichotomy
is entirely illusory: the stylesheets are NOT intended as an example of 
TEI XSLT programming at all,
but as a serious contribution for real use. The idea of them as an 
"example" is a piece of mischievous whimsy
spread by Michael Beddow; they are _not_ written as a master class in 
obscure XSLT to challenge
future generations! The dichotomy is between their twin parentage of 
what I provide and maintain
for my local department, and what I wrote with NSF funding for the TEI. 
Possibly in retrospect it was a bad
idea to make the stylesheets for the TEIC depend on the ones for Oxford.

It seems to me that there are two very different problems here:

 a) we  need more examples of TEI-processing software for people to 
study and get ideas from.
    we definitely want to encourage people to show their work. I 
personally dislike the idea of a
    competition, but its a possible way to proceed.

 b) we (the TEIC) own the copyright[1] of all the XSLT code which I 
maintain on Sourceforge, and
   we need it for our internal work (viz, producing the Guidelines); but 
those stylesheets are not
   well-documented, and their parameterized interface is fairly 
off-putting as a result. We need to
   decide whether the TEI really wants this sorted out, and take a more 
positive fatherhood role over its
   bastard child, or whether to leave them as is as internal tools which 
the editorial process uses.
  
I don't think you solve problem b) with the solution to problem a).  So 
which do we care about more?

Just to clear up a misunderstanding, by the way, the stylesheet releases 
on the TEI Web site
are the last version which I wanted to release  publicly. I have not 
neglected this, it is
intentional. I am currently in the throes of making the stylesheets do 
the right thing
with xml:id and @target, so they are in a mess right now.

[1] its rather important that this be the case, as otherwise I'd have 
problems with IPR at Oxford. long
story.

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

OSS Watch: JISC Open Source Advisory Service
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