[tei-council] Ne release of P5

[Christian Wittern]

Lou Burnard <lou.burnard at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> writes:

> Actually, the note Sebastian posted was written (and signed) by me, so
> it isn't really fair to blame him for its content.

Sorry, that escaped me. However, I am not blaming him or you, I see
this as one step towards a better procedure to handle this.

> I took the view that, since we do have a new element biblItem in this
> release, it is as well admit to its existence. I don't see that it's a
> PR disaster -- it's the truth of the current situation that we have
> some unsatisfactory work which needs further examination -- quite a
> lot of it in fact, not just this element.
>
> What harm will there be in later saying "biblItem" removed -- if
> that's what we decide to do?

Although P5 is clearly marked as in development, I do think that once
we said publicly "we added <blurb>" the impression the public will get
is that we made a decision and plan to go with that.

Having it sitting in the CVS source without further comment, pending a
decision is something rather different.  biblItem is a special case in
that, as I was told by you, it entered life in P5 as a replacement to
biblStruct, which was a mistake, which caused quite some grief for a
while.  Thinking of it more clearly in Paris, we decided that we
probably do not want biblItem, and rather tweak the other three bibl*
elements.  Given this situation, I think explicitly announcing it as
"newly added" does give a wrong impression. 

>
> I dont think there's any need to call attention to the fragility of
> this particular element (I'm sure there are plenty of others equally
> fragile) but would be curious to know if other council members feel we
> should do so.

There are others, I agree, but the situation with these others is
different from biblItem.

All the best,

Christian

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