[tei-council] TEI Conformance

[James Cummings]

Christian Wittern wrote:
>> In short, I think it's just infeasible to constrain the namespaces which
>> "conformant" TEI customisations may introduce (except that they must not
>> use the empty namespace or the TEI namespace). 
> 
> But these are different XML vocabularies, not user extensions of the
> TEI?  I thought our discussion was about what namespace to use for
> elements and attributes (re)defined using the ODD mechanism.  For
> existing vocabularies, you would typically just pull in the schema
> file into your own extension, but not add a new namespace to them?

Ditto.  We aren't in any way saying people can't use *other* namespaces.  Just
when they use one to create TEI extensions, that this (consensus seems to be)
should include the letters TEI somewhere in it.


> And since I see not compelling reason for going into this business, I
> think this is a bad idea.  Thus for me the compromise of having users
> define their own namespace string, but give a nod to TEI seems a good
> solution.  We could of course say *should* use the letters tei
> somewhere, not *must*. 

I was only ever going to say *should* rather than *must*.  I think a document is
conformant if its TEI extensions don't mention the TEI, but I think it is best
practice for them to do so.


> Right, we should think about attributes as well.  I think it should be
> mandated to use a full qualified name if the NS of the attribute is
> different from that one of the element, which I think is in fact
> common practice.

Yes, am I mistaken that attributes defaultly inherit the namespace of the
element to which they are attached?  Thus:

<tei:element decls="#foo" xml:id="abc123" rng:something="blah"/>

Is an element in the tei namespace (however that is defined above), and has an
attribute tei:decls, but the local-name prefix tei: is not needed because the
namespace is inherited from the element it is on.  This also has two attributes
in other namespaces.

Am I mistaken about that? It shouldn't be tei:decls="#foo" should it?!

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk