[tei-council] Possibilities for new file names.

Tue Jul 25 07:37:28 EDT 2006

In looking at the minutes from last meeting I realised I had completely
forgotten to suggest new file names for the chapters.  The problem was that many
people might look at the (usually) two-letter codes and have no clue what MD,
TS, NH, and many other filenames mean.

A few things to consider:

With the new subversion file structure accommodating internationalisation by
placing things in /P5/Source/Guidelines/en (or another language code), whatever
scheme for renaming these files might exist must also fit in with the
possibility or internationalisation.

Some people, inexplicably, like the two letter codes.  (Maybe it is the
misplaced sense of superiority, gnostic wisdom, or other special feeling they
get when knowing what 'CH' means... maybe it is just that they are used to them
as shortcuts.)

An argument for keeping the two letter codes is internationalization.  If
someone refers to fr/HD.xml it is clear they are talking about the same thing as
is in en/HD.xml, but if it was fr/En-tête_TEI.xml then non-french speakers might
not know it was about the header.

Any proposed solution should avoid complicating this further.

Although it has been suggested that we could do away with the two-letter codes
in favour of the chapter number, I don't think we should tie ourselves to a
particular chapter being in a particular place. I felt The only thing suggested
to me that makes any kind of sense so far is to combine the existing two letter
codes with descriptive names.  Since the chapters already have existing
descriptive names (their titles), it would make sense to use these.  So:

en/HD.xml would become en/HD-The_TEI_Header.xml
and fr/HD.XML would become fr/HD-En-tête_TEI.xml

We would know they were discussing the same topic by the HD- prefix.  This
could, however, end up with some quite long filenames.

If this is proposal is applied to all of the files in en/*.xml at the moment one
gets:

AB.xml -> AB-About_These_Guidelines.xml
AI.xml -> AI-Simple_Analytic_Mechanisms.xml
BIB.xml -> BIB-Bibliography.xml
CC.xml -> CC-Language_Corpora.xml
CE.xml -> CE-Certainty_and_Responsibility.xml
CF.xml -> CF-Conformance.xml
CH.xml -> CH-Languages_and_Character_Sets
COL.xml -> COL-Colophon.xml
CO.xml -> CO-Elements_Available_in_All_TEI_Documents.xml
DEDICATION.xml (no change needed!)
DI.xml -> DI-Print_Dictionaries.xml
DR.xml -> DR-Performance_Texts.xml
DS.xml -> DS-Default_Text_Structure.xml
DT.xml -> DT-Obtaining_the_TEI_Schemas.xml
FD.xml -> FD-Feature_System_Declaration.xml
FM1.xml -> FM1-Introductory_Note.xml
FS.xml -> FS-Feature-Structures.xml
FT.xml -> FT-Tables_Formulae_and_Graphics.xml
GD.xml -> GD-Graphs_Networks_and_Trees.xml
guidelines-en.xml (no change needed!)
HD.xml -> HD-The_TEI_Header.xml
IN.xml -> IN-Rules_for_Interchange.xml
MD.xml -> MD-Modifying_and_Customizing_the_TEI_DTD.xml
MS.xml -> MS-Manuscript_Description.xml
ND.xml -> ND-Names_and_Dates.xml
NH.xml -> NH-Multiple_Hierarchies.xml
PARTIND.xml (no renaming? or rename to something with 'index' in the name?)
PH.xml -> PH-Transcription_of_Primary_Sources.xml
PREFS.xml -> Prefatory_Note.xml
REFCLA.xml -> Element_Classes.xml
REFENT.xml -> Macros.xml
REFTAG.xml -> Elements.xml
SA.xml -> SA-Linking_Segmentation_and_Alignment.xml
SG.xml -> SG-A_Gentle_Introduction_to_XML.xml
SH.xml -> SH-Header_Elements_and_Their_Relationship_to_Other_Metadata_Standards.xml
ST.xml -> ST-The_TEI_Infrastructure.xml
TC.xml -> TC-Critical_Apparatus.xml
TD.xml -> TD-Documentation_Elements.xml
TE.xml -> TE-Terminological_Databases.xml
TS.xml -> TS-Transcriptions_of_Speech.xml
VE.xml -> VE-Base_Tag_Set_for_Verse.xml
WD.xml -> WD-Representation_of_non-standard_characters_and_glyphs.xml

Some of these are a bit long, obviously, and what I'd suggest is that we modify
the filenames not just to be the first <head> of each of the files, but instead
a sensible human-readable name or phrase which does sum up that chapter.

So something like:

*AB.xml -> AB-About.xml
*AI.xml -> AI-Analytic_Mechanisms.xml
BIB.xml -> BIB-Bibliography.xml
CC.xml -> CC-Language_Corpora.xml
CE.xml -> CE-Certainty_and_Responsibility.xml
CF.xml -> CF-Conformance.xml
CH.xml -> CH-Languages_and_Character_Sets
COL.xml -> COL-Colophon.xml
*CO.xml -> CO-Core_Elements.xml
DEDICATION.xml (no change needed!)
DI.xml -> DI-Print_Dictionaries.xml
DR.xml -> DR-Performance_Texts.xml
DS.xml -> DS-Default_Text_Structure.xml
DT.xml -> DT-Obtaining_the_TEI_Schemas.xml
FD.xml -> FD-Feature_System_Declaration.xml
FM1.xml -> FM1-Introductory_Note.xml
FS.xml -> FS-Feature-Structures.xml
FT.xml -> FT-Tables_Formulae_and_Graphics.xml
GD.xml -> GD-Graphs_Networks_and_Trees.xml
guidelines-en.xml (no change needed!)
HD.xml -> HD-The_TEI_Header.xml
IN.xml -> IN-Rules_for_Interchange.xml
*MD.xml -> MD-Modifying_and_Customizing_the_TEI.xml
MS.xml -> MS-Manuscript_Description.xml
ND.xml -> ND-Names_and_Dates.xml
NH.xml -> NH-Multiple_Hierarchies.xml
PARTIND.xml (no renaming? or rename to something with 'index' in the name?)
*PH.xml -> PH-Primary_Sources.xml
PREFS.xml -> Prefatory_Note.xml
REFCLA.xml -> Element_Classes.xml
REFENT.xml -> Macros.xml
REFTAG.xml -> Elements.xml
SA.xml -> SA-Linking_Segmentation_and_Alignment.xml
*SG.xml -> SG-Gentle_Introduction.xml
*SH.xml -> SH-Other_Metadata_Standards.xml
*ST.xml -> ST-TEI_Infrastructure.xml
TC.xml -> TC-Critical_Apparatus.xml
TD.xml -> TD-Documentation_Elements.xml
TE.xml -> TE-Terminological_Databases.xml
TS.xml -> TS-Transcriptions_of_Speech.xml
*VE.xml -> VE-Verse.xml
*WD.xml -> WD-non-standard_characters_and_glyphs.xml

Other suggestions or options include removing the two-letter prefix entirely
(but then how do we properly internationalise them?) and/or including a chapter
number prefix so they'd always be sorted in the right order, etc.  But do we
want people to think and talk of Chapter 13  instead of thinking and talking
about the chapter on Manuscript Description?

Food for thought.

-James