[tei-council] reviewing SA again;what is standoff?

[James Cummings]

Syd Bauman wrote:
> Well, such uses for stand-off are not described anywhere generically,
> I don't think. They are discussed when particular issues are
> discussed, like the use of <join> or <link>.
> 
> Very well may be a good idea to have a more generic discussion.

Perhaps there should be a section earlier in chapter 14 to discuss 
this more generally, as well as discussing the use of xinclude 
basically to include boilerplate text, chapters, etc.  This is the way 
people are going to want to use this (in preference to entities), so I 
feel that we should at least have a brief discussion of it.

However, I don't think anyone would suggest that XInclude become part 
of the TEI -- that the Xinclude namespace be incorporated into the 
TEI.  Exactly in the same way that the SVG namespace shouldn't be 
incorporated into the TEI.  In both cases we should give explanations 
and examples, and an easy acceptable way for customisation to allow 
it, and indicate that this is the recommended method to do this kind 
of thing.

> No, and IMHO it almost certainly should be. Lou still holds that
> entity references are the way to do these things, though. (I do not
> claim TEI should *not* discuss entities, only that we should discuss
> XInclude, whether instead of or in addition to entities.)

I do not want to use entities in my documents any more.  Especially 
not for including other bits of text or documents.  But that is a 
personal opinion.  I would suggest that we want to discuss entities as 
one possible (and IMHO now dated) method to do this type of thing, and 
XInclude at the same time.  (As well as any other possibilities?)

> identifiers and be happy. Heck, that's what I do!

Well, one of the things the TEI has claimed in the past is that the 
Guidelines stand as an evolving record of contemporary recommended 
practice.  Thus the things we do should be reflected in there if 
central to the purpose of the Guidelines.


I don't think 14.9 should disappear (otherwise I would have said so 
when I read it and reported earlier), but I do think if it exists then 
the other more common uses of XInclude should be described somewhere, 
possibly in this chapter.

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford