[tei-council] TEI Conformance

Sebastian Rahtz sebastian.rahtz at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Tue Nov 28 14:03:51 EST 2006


Syd Bauman wrote:
> I don't know what Dan has in mind with "not TEI-certified
> Conformant", but I think we have been and should continue to be
> really clear that
>   
you'll be amazed (:-}) to hear that I think
all these statements are what we should be
moving away from, viz
> * the TEI is not in the business of certifying things
>   
I would say that is why we have the Consortium
> * conformance is like validity: either you are or you aren't
>   
the current draft of conformance does not really
support this statement
> * conformance must permit scholars to create their own, conformant,
>   arcane encodings for things we haven't thought of
>   
s/conformant//    and I would agree...
> * conformance should make it easy for scholars to do so
>   
Are we in the business of doing it right or making
it easy?
> * it is very important that we continue to make efforts to lower the
>   barriers to TEI usage
>   
sort of. But I want to _raise_ the barrier of conformance....
> And yes, that second bullet point entirely negates the idea of
> different "levels" or "types" of conformance. What is being discussed
> at http://www.tei-c.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Conformance is *not*
> conformance, but rather "degrees of interchangeability" or some such.
>   
I might agree that the phrase "degrees of interchangeability"
is more useful. But in that case I don't think conformance
means very much at all, and we might as well drop the word
if it means no more than a self-assessed moral claim
to being good.

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      

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