[tei-council] TEI Conformance

[Syd Bauman]

So far I don't disagree significantly with anything y'all seem to be
heading towards:

* TEI elements in TEI namespace

* User (ODD-created) elements in user namespace, Guidelines will
  suggest a best practice for naming convention of URI
  - We should consider recommending that user namespaces be URLs iff
    they resolve to something, and URNs otherwise. But since the
    practice of using URLs that point nowhere is so commonplace, I'm
    not sure this will make the TEI world a better place

* External schemas sucked in stay in their own namespace

* TEI-C will consider providing service of ODDs in
  http://www.tei-c.org/ as a member benefit sometime ... it may be a
  good idea, but it may well be a business we want to stay out of

* User (ODD-created) attributes added to existing TEI element should
  be in user namespace

But some good points and questions are raised by James's question on
attributes. Attributes, unlike elements, are not in a default
namespace. If an attribute doesn't have a prefix, it's in the null
namespace. (The spec has another name for this, I know.) Thus,

   <tei:p xmlns:tei="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
     This is an <tei:hi tei:rend="bold">INVALID</tei:hi> test.
   </tei:p>

is quite different than

   <tei:p xmlns:tei="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
     This is a <tei:hi rend="bold">valid</tei:hi> test.
   </tei:p>

So we need to think about how an ODD-creating user says "My new <foo>
element has a blort= attribute that is just like the TEI blort=
attribute; my new <bar> element has a blort= attribute that is
completely different".

We also need to think through what should be done when a user adds a
"normal" TEI attribute to a "normal" TEI element that does not
"normally" have that attribute, either directly in the ODD or by
class membership.

I'm sure there are other issues to be tackled, just giving a flavor
of the kinds of worms we're going to have to eat if we open this can.