[tei-council] TEI Numbered Divs Survey: The Results.

[Lou Burnard]

I think James has done a great job here. I assume he'll be posting this 
summary along with the decisions arising from it to TEI-L in due course.

For the record, I also agree with his conclusions as follows:

1. we should abolish div0
2. we should retain a choice between div and div1 as the next hierarchic 
level within front, body, back
3. this kind of user-consultation can be very effective

However, I feel the need for some reassurance about the way it's 
proposed to make all these additional model classes. Two reasons have 
been advanced:

a.  without them, it is hard or impossible to define a robust content 
model for body etc.
b. with them, users can use more "natural" like element names ("chapter" 
"section" etc.)

Reason (a) looks plausible -- "robust" here means that you can delete 
things from a schema without generating ambiguity, and this will at a 
stroke reduce the number of white hairs generated when trying to make 
sense of the existing content models

Reason (b) I like less. Why do we have <div>s at all if we are going to 
do this?  It is contrary to  the original design decision, which was to 
apply Occam's razor to this problem (you say "section" and I say "part" 
-- let's call the whole thing "div").  Maybe I'm just worried about all 
the rewriting that will have to be done if we take this proposal seriously.

Lou


James Cummings wrote:
> Dear Council,
>
> I have closed the TEI Numbered Divs survey and would like to report on 
> the results.  I have made a PDF of the summary report that Survey 
> Monkey provides. It is available for download at: