[tei-council] Draft reply to John Smith

[Christian Wittern]

Dear Council members,

As promised, here is the draft of my reply to John Smith and the
Sanskrit taskforce.  Any comments welcome.

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Dear John,

At its recent telephone conference, the TEI Council discussed the
proposal you submitted on behalf of the Sanskrit taskforce and I would
like to inform you now of the results.

The TEI Council welcomed the submission and would like to thank you
and your collaborators for your work at enhancing the TEI
applicability to Sanskrit and other languages that require complex
analytical encoding.  

The TEI Council agreed that the proposed form could be used to encode
this forms for data interchange and that it should be used in the next
version of the Guidelines to illustrate the use the intended
linguistic analysis, as well as the use of <seg> within <choice>.  

The ensuing discussion centered around how the constraints on the use
of attribute values, that are implicit or in the text of your proposal
could be formalized using a schema language.  Several possibilities
were proposed, but none of them could be immediately agreed on.  As it
turned out, validation in a very rigid form for a case like this will
require the TEI to review the procedures within the overall framework
of the TEI.  

The last issue, which basically means that no immediate, automatic
validation through a xml parser is available, should be a minor
concern to your group, I think, since the software you are developping
will act as some kind of special-purpose-validator, as its function
will depend on the correct application of the markup.  If that does
not sound feasible, a Schematron rule could be used to validate the
markup.

While the validation procedure is still pending, the TEI Council
thinks the markup as suggested is useful and appropriate and would
like to encourage you to implement it as it stands.


All the best,

Christian Wittern 

Chair, TEI Technical Council


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-- 

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