[tei-council] Possibilities for new file names.

[Dot Porter]

Hi James and Council,

I'd like to go on the record as saying that I think that changing the
short names of the chapters is unnecessary. I think that time spent on
deciding whether the chapter on multiple hierarchies should be "MH" or
"NH" (and then on actually making that change - and all the others
that would come out of this - consistent in the file names and within
the Guidelines) might be time better spent on more substantive things.

Just my $.02.

Dot

On 8/4/06, James Cummings
<James.Cummings at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > tei-council mailing list
> > tei-council at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> > http://lists.village.Virginia.EDU/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> tei-council mailing list
> tei-council at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> http://lists.village.Virginia.EDU/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
>


-- 
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Dot Porter, University of Kentucky
#####
Program Coordinator
Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities
dporter at uky.edu          859-257-9549
#####
Editorial Assistant, REVEAL Project
Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments
porter at vis.uky.edu
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