[tei-council] on META and P5EC

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Syd Bauman wrote:

>work to do. Besides major issues like co-occurrence constraints and
>the Durand conundrum
>
I really have no idea where to go with this. We've discussed
it several times, and people like Syd and I have come up with
various ideas, but I at least waver on a practically
daily basis between:

 1. leave it as is
 2. tinker with it to get more features
 3. throw it all away a la Docbook

My feeling is that that we cannot reach any consensus without
a larger group of people using ODDs. The people I know of
who have written or edited a New Generation ODD from scratch are:
me,  Laurent, Stuart Brown, and Tone Merete. That's not a large
enough sample to say whether it is good enough or not.


>there are also minor issues that may arise,
>including delving further into the meaning and application of
><equiv>, adding features for handling overlapping hierarchies easier,
>and constructing datatypes that more properly represent textual data
>(I'm thinking of dates & times here, but there may be others).
>  
>
these don't really strike me as META matters. the group's summary says:

* The ODD format should be revised: DONE
* The ODD format and the current TEI  DTD for tag documentation
(TSD) should be combined : DONE
* Additional processors should be created to make not
only XML DTDs (and possibly SGML as well), but also at least
one XML schema format: DONE
* Where possible, data types should be converted to use the
datatype library of the W3C: DONE
* The Pizza Chef should be rewritten to allow user choice
of DTD or schema output: DONE

so I'd argue that ongoing work should revert back to normal methods
(whatever they are!)

>Moreover, I will not be at all surprised if the first time ODD is
>employed to create some other tagset (besides P5) problems we've not
>anticipated arise.
>  
>
that's an interesting research topic, I agree. 

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

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