[tei-council] More on TEI Lite: work in progress

[James Cummings]

Lou Burnard wrote:
> Sympathetic as I am to the suggestion that <g> should be usable in a TEI
> Lite document, I am also feeling somewhat daunted at the extra baggage
> this would entail. It isn't just a matter of adding <g>, you also have
> to add  all the paraphernalia of <charDesc> -- some dozen extra elements.

I have to disagree with some other members of the council on this.  I think TEI
Lite should expressly *not* contain <g>.  This does not mean I don't like people
using non-standard character or glyph, simply that I strongly feel that if they
are doing something unusual (i.e. using such characters) then they would benefit
more greatly from using 'full' TEI and/or creating their own customisation. TEI
Lite should be just that, 'Lite'.

However, I do have the following comments:

1) Section 17: should be expanded a bit, perhaps mentioning that if one needs to
use strange non-unicode characters that the full version of TEI has the
capability to allow you to do this with <g>.

2) Section 17:  It may be misleading to say "Unicode as the required character
set for all documents", as XML allows you to specify other encodings, isn't it
the parsers which have to worry about changing them to unicode.

3) Section 17: Perhaps providing some examples of unicode character entity usage
might make the last sentence clearer.

4) Somewhere there should be a short discussion that TEI-Lite is expressed as an
ODD and either a copy of that ODD or a link to it.  This discussion should
mention Roma and that TEI users have the ability to make their own
customisations if they don't like TEI Lite.

5) Section 19.4: Isn't @who a pointer and so need a '#' at the front of it?  In
fact, there should be some discussion of where @who is pointing to (if in the
same document).  The example in 19.1.1 doesn't contain an xml:id ... it would be
 good if these two examples could work together.

6) There are various other uses of @who without '#', is the same true about @hand?

7) Section 9.3: "In a modern edition, an editor might wish to represent this as
‘with’, italicising the letters not found in the source." ... The 'i' and the
'h'appear bold in my browser and since you are talking about italicising them
this might prove confusing to readers.


-James