[tei-council] numbered divs, a proposed solution

James Cummings James.Cummings at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Mon Jan 8 05:30:39 EST 2007


Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> You can hardly have failed to notice the argument on TEI-L
> which revolved around Ron vd B's innocuous expectation
> that if he  deleted mumbered divs in his ODD, he would
> get a valid DTD.

I agree that this is an innocuous expectation and that he should be able to
delete numbered divs.  When we discussed and decided to drop support for SGML
(around 2006-09-14) it was mentioned that the support for DTDs was also
difficult.  I'm assuming this is an example of that.  Does this problem exist in
the generated schemas, or only the DTDs?

> I know one should not solve a general problem by dealing
> with a special case case, but I also think that there is a time for
> compromise and practicality, so I have a firm proposal which
> I'd like you to consider. I claim it will solve this problem
> at a relatively small cost, compared to the public
> embarassment this will keep on causing.

I agree that the problem needs to be solved one way or another.

> The "div-like" would be expressed as a new
> class model.divLike, and its membership would be
> div, div0, div1 and divGen.

I suppose we couldn't re-open the issue of whether we should just get rid of the
option of div0|div1 and just pick one or the other?

> Bad things:
> 1. you can interleave div, div1 and div0 ad lib.
> 2. if model.divLike is entirely empty, it fails at present cos of
> globals being ambiguous

These are both quite bad in my mind. 1) The whole point of divs vs numbered divs
is that they are mutually exclusive isn't it?  I mean I'm not supposed to be
able to use both in the same document?

> To deal with the first bad thing, I have added a Schematron test
> which detects silly combinations. The second requires
> some more jiggery-pokery; I think it's solvable with a lot
> of patience.

So, is the real issue behind this whether we want to rely on Schematron for
these tests? And to do so for a special case solution?  Does adopting Schematron
for this have any negative implications?

> I take it as axiomatic that we cannot simply leave the
> current setup as it is. We must do _something_ to allow
> the simple case of "delete numbered divs" to work.

I agree that something must be done.  Does any one have any suggested alternatives?

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



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