[tei-council] on conformance document

[Lou's Laptop]

I think this discussion is drifting from the point. We should be trying 
to decide what is right for P5, not speculate about how much market 
penetration we might achieve or might have achieved.
 
There are many XML schemes out in the world, most of them specialized to 
a particular niche. The TEI's claim is that has sufficient generality 
and coverage in its semantics that it can be customized to meet most 
needs without too much effort.  In terms of complexity, we need to show 
that it scales up (not a problem) but also that it scales down, which we 
have not bothered much about historically, in part because of the nature 
of SGML. And we need to have a metric to assess the interchangeability 
(that's what the I in TEI is for, remember) of the resulting documents. 
That's what conformance is.



Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Syd Bauman wrote:
>> written. I think it is safe to say that some of those 140 examples
>> would not have used TEI if they had been pigeon-holed into using
>> vanilla P3. 
> I quite agree that this is possible. I would not
> use the word "safe" myself.
>
>> (Yes, it is also *may* be the case that some other
>> projects would have used TEI if were not so malleable, but I'm not
>> aware of any. Note that I didn't say "forgiving", for depending on
>> your interpretation, I do know projects that have eschewed TEI.)
>>   
> can you mention some, if it would be sensible
> on a publicly-read list? do you know of a good project
> which could/should have used TEI, but was
> put off and used something else instead (where
> "good" means "good example of a..."!)
>> BTW, I think the fact that we only have 140 projects listed
>> demonstrates our miserable capability to ascertain who is using TEI,
>> not that there are really only 140 users in the world.
>>   
> quite likely, yes.  but suppose its only 10%,
> even 1400 users isn't much. If its 1%,
> 14000 users looks better, but even that
> would only be acceptable.
>