[tei-council] two <date> proposals: 1 lumping, 1 splitting

[Syd Bauman]

> I suggested and James did not violently dissent from the view that
> maybe this degree of tagging was a bit unhealthy, and that we might
> consider either silently dropping these elements from the already
> rather bloated ND chapter, or giving them only as an example of the
> sort of extension someone might like to make. We've been ridiculed
> in some quarters for this sort of "markup voodoo" and I don't know
> of any single case where it's been used in earnest. These are not
> conclusive arguments for removing these elements, I agree.

Did he dissent non-violently?

There are *no* nested <date>s (or <time>s) in the distributed WWP
corpus. If we don't do it ... :-)

Nonetheless, I am a bit uncomfortable silently dropping these
elements without posting to TEI-L and finding either
a) no one uses them, OR
b) very few people want them AND we create an exemplar customization
   that includes them

If we find a lot of people do want them, we probably shouldn't drop
them. 


> I am not so sure about that. Doesn't it mean that we can locate the
> name or language knowledge to a specific date, but don't wish to
> claim anything about how long the state of affairs maintained?

Hmmm... I think you're comment brings out the fact that I did not
express myself well at all, perhaps because I'm confused.

I'm claiming that, semantically, a value= attribute on a name ought
to say something about *the name*, not about the date(s) it was used.
Perhaps it should mean something about the value of the name to its
holder -- value="worthless" :-)

An argument can be made, I think, for notBefore= and notAfter=.
Probably even for from= and to=, although it's a bit weirder. (Why is
it expressing a temporal and not a spatial or geo-political range?)
But my first reaction is that value= is a bit hard to swallow.


[Waiting for next post before further comment, although I also am not
very worried about "whole range" vs "point within range" ambiguity,
although we may want to discuss it a bit somewhere in the Guidelines,
or make which is the case explicit for each element.]