[tei-council] Re: on spec grp 4, coded values

[Christian Wittern]

Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman at Brown.edu> writes:

> [Note: despite the In-Reply-To field, this commentary is based on the
>  new version Lou just put out at
>  http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Drafts/DTYPES/ (the main site is down).]
>
> On Specification group 4: Datatypes: coded values
> -- ------------- ----- -- ---------- ----- ------
>
> * tei.data.code: the change permits any pointer; the recommendation
>   in ED W 90 is for local pointers only. We've talked about this
>   somewhat over the past few weeks or so, but IIRC, no one has said
>   anything on this issue except Lou and Syd. Lou has said (at least
>   twice) that he thinks it should be a generic pointer, but has not
>   expressed why.
>
>   I think there are several good reasons to restrict these kinds of
>   references to local pointers.

I assume you are talking about pointers to the current document in the
ID/IDREF tradition.

I think I understand your argument, but I have to warn you that I
think the notion of local gets somehow blurred when you start to have
things like xinclude and even more if you put your stuff into XML
databases -- the latter introduce even more complications with the
notion of collections, which are not the current docuemnt, but also
not really not local.

So I am not really convinced the argument local vs remote gets you
anywhere in the real world, except maybe that it makes the validation
a lot easier if you want to enforce only #pointers.

As you see, I am back in circulation and hope to take up some other
issues as well.

All the best,

Christian

-- 

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