[tei-council] Assessment of Example infrastructure

[Christian Wittern]

Assessment of Example infrastructure

At the last Council meeting, I was instructed to asses how the current
infrastructure could cope with the internationalization of examples.
Here is the result.

1.  The current infrastructure embeds examples into the *spec file of
the thing it is meant to illustrate.

2. Othe I18N features, for example the translation of <desc> elements is
handles by embedding the translations into the *spec file.  Translations
are identified by their @xml:lang attribute value.

A similar mechanism could be adopted for examples, which would be the
easiest solution, that is using @xml:lang on egXML.

A drawback of the current setup (not limited to I18N) is that there is a
1:1 relationship between example and exemplified feature.  This means
that if one and the same example could be used to illustrate multiple
elements, it has to be repeated.  A possible solution would be to store
the examples elsewhere and indicate the identity of the thing
illustrated by a @targets element, which should then point to the @ident
value of the thing illustrated.  This would require a reshuffling of
bytes in the sourcetree, which if necessary should be undertaken rather
soon.

Christian Wittern



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 Christian Wittern
 Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
 47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN