[tei-council] datatypes again: make data.key a URI

[Lou Burnard]

Christian Wittern wrote:
> Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman at Brown.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>>I think I'd prefer to leave it a string, but this may require more
>>thought. My current reasoning is as follows.
> 
> 
> 
> +1 from me.  
> 
> I might construct URI's from @key in my application, but
> I would not want them to start their life as such. @key is a string in
> my world and I would prefer it to stay such.
> 
> Christian
> 


My reason for making this change is that I want to enable people to do 
things like

<person xml:id="foo">....</person>

<name key="#foo">Mr Phoo</name>

and get some validation. This seems to be highly desirable, especially 
when we have a proper personography in place, and I suspect it will 
become the typical case. After all, it is possible to make almost 
anything into a URL.

To support additionally your requirement for "key" explicitly to point 
to something external and non XML we could do one of the following

-- use another attribute -- but then people have to choose which and we 
risk ambiguity if one points at one thing and the other at another

-- add explicit rules about how a URL is to be constructed from the key 
value, either in P5 or in the document instance

What I don't know for sure is what in principle it means to say
<name key="foo"> where foo is defined as a URL -- it's not a validation 
error, so it may be that we can just say that if the value is like this 
it is an application dependent string just like the old key thing was.