[tei-council] customization in P5

[Syd Bauman]

I personally think that we should explicitly drop the idea of support
for customizations in DTD, W3C Schema, or any language other than ODD
and RelaxNG. Even the RelaxNG customizations should be downplayed as
something one does only when necessary, or for throw-away
one-time-use schemas. Moreover, my vague recollection from the
2005-04 meeting in Paris is that exactly this was decided there.
Various opinions were expressed as to whether customizations should
be permitted in RelaxNG (some against, many abstaining, and only 1 in
favor -- me), but nobody defended permitting customizations in DTD or
XSD. However, I can't find any reference to this in the minutes,
though. (Which would be my fault, I know.)-:

Thus I think the chapters on structure (ST) and customization (MD)
should barely mention DTDs nor W3C Schemas if at all. The chapter on
conformance (CF) should mention them only in as far as to point out
they are not the canonical expression of TEI constraints. (Of course,
neither is the RelaxNG, but it's at least a step closer.)

This would be a reversal of a decision Council made at the Oxford
meeting in 2003 (a decision I have to admit I supported at the time),
but I think it would be a really good idea to unchain TEI from DTDs
and XSDs as much as possible. It is not at all clear to me that the
effort and compromises needed to support even generating schemata in
DTDs and XSDs is worth it -- certainly the effort and compromises
needed to support customizations in those languages doesn't even come
close to being worth the benefit.

While I'm at it, there is another decision Council made at that
meeting which needs attention. We agreed then that the formal
definitions in the HTML version of P5 should be expressible in one 
or more of
   RelaxNG compact
   RelaxNG XML
   W3C Schema
   DTD
at user option. I think we should explicitly say that we will work on
releasing P5 with only RelaxNG compact declarations in the HTML
first, and then work on permitting expression of the latter 3 only if
there is some demand.