[tei-council] datatypes -- syd's comments

[Lou Burnard]

Syd Bauman wrote:

>* tei.data.probability: Hmmm... this might work. It is a bit
>  confusing. The problem is that, because the recommendation in
>  DTYPES has removed the percent sign, there is no way to distinguish
>  "1" meaning 100% from "1" meaning 1%. 
>
Ah! good point. But what is your recommendation?
(a) decide whether probability shd be expressed as a number between 0 
and 1 or as a number between 0 and 100 and then enforce one of them (if 
so, which?)
(b) allow both as alternatives, but require that the latter (1 to 100) 
is always followed by a percent sign
(c) leave things as proposed but note the constraint that numbers 
between 0 and 1 must be expressed including a decimal point.

Being a lazy person, I have a slight preference for (c) though it's hard 
to care very much about this:  the total number of attributes affected 
in the current version of edw90 table is one (1)

>* tei.data.numeric: the change removes support for a constituency
>  that we already now about: those who need to enter floating point
>  numbers. Furthermore, I still claim it makes sense to permit
>  percentages. (One could argue, though, that the percentages should
>  be limited to 8 characters maximum (effectively limiting them to 3
>  or 4 decimal places of precision), so that any tei.data.numeric
>  value could fit into 64 bits.)
>  
>
I don't completely understand this comment since tei.data.numeric maps 
to xsd:decimal which does support floating point numbers.  I assume what 
you mean is that such numbers can't be represented using the 
mantis+exponent (aka "scientific") notation. So it will permit 
"1.23456789" but not  "2e0.134"

Again, I find very few real use cases in the edw90 table -- in fact the 
only case where I suppose it might be plausible to permit the scientific 
notation is the value attribute on <numeric> and <num>

I can't see any use case where you might want to supply a percentage so 
I am not very enthusiastic about that either. Would tei.data.probability 
suit them?