[tei-council] Possibilities for new file names.

[James Cummings]

Dear Council,

Just a reminder to look at the Short Names proposal and make comments
(especially against) it, otherwise it will be implemented on 2006-09-01.
(According to the minutes of the last conference call.)

I had originally intended my suggestions below as a straw man, from which a
consensus of a better set of names might be reached after some bickering. :-)
I'm not entirely happy with them as they are and feel that they still might be a
bit long.  Remember that this would most likely also affect the URLs on the
website as well.

Are the current two letter abbreviations better? Should we just use chapter
numbers? Do you have an even better suggestion?

-James.

James Cummings wrote:
> 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
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