[tei-council] TEI Conformance

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Syd Bauman wrote:
> Those who wrote the Charter did not agree, apparently. (Although
> certifying things *could* be part of what we do, it is not *why* we
> have a Consortium.)
>   
ok, true.

> And this is the absolute and most important crux of the issue that I
> am repeatedly harping on. It is *absolutely essential*, no less, that
> TEI continue to support as "conformant" encodings that are outside
> the off-the-shelf TEI box.
depends what you mean by "off-the-shelf".
>  If we don't, we will find lots of projects
> that are faced with the choice between tag abuse and loss of funding.
> Most will choose tag abuse, or (as sometimes happens now) just say
> that they are TEI conformant when they're not.
>   
Let's be positive, and think that in time they will
mend their evil ways. After all, self-claimed
conformance will eventually be checked,
and some of the tag abusers will be detected. It
may take a while.

Anyway, what we have today is a whole slew
of people claiming they are TEI to impress
their funders, and it having no meaning at all.
Who does that help?
>
>> sort of. But I want to _raise_ the barrier of conformance....
>>     
>
> Raise it? It is already so high that many, if not most, projects
> don't actually meet it. 
the current barrier says "use the <TEI.2> element; use a bit
of the header (empty or variant content is fine); be good".
Not a very a high barrier....
>
>
> Good! You, James, and at least one or two other people on this list
> have all agreed to my proposal that we consider "degrees of
> interchangeability" the place where we discuss things like the fact
> that it is easier to interchange documents that conform to a strict
> subset of tei_all, etc., reserving the word "conformance" for only an
> adherence to a very encompassing set of general rules much as we had
> in P4.
>
> However, every time the discussion comes up the word "conformance" is
> used with the former meaning, or at least is ambiguous.
>   
If we talk about Interchangeability Profiles as the only
place we specify any rules a funder can look at,
then they'll use that instead of Conformance (if that's
just "be good") as a stick to beat people with (and quite right too).
So we'd be back where we started.
>   
> The rules for conformance
> are very explicit, very clear, and (for the most part) syntactically
> not hard to test at all.
>   
P4 conformance would allow more or less any arbitrary
document to be TEI compliant, if if just defines itself
in TEI extension files. How does that help anyone?
I could describe a Docbook file in TEI P4.....


-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      

Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
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