[tei-council] date attributes: summary, problems, and some suggestions

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Christian Wittern wrote:
> How about we just give the users a spot in the header to declare which 
> one they are using ("xsd", "oxygen", "nxml", "you-name-it"), without 
> actually implementing our own?  The only thing we will have to ponder 
> is if we want to maintain a registry of values for this list -- I 
> would say that might be the price we have to pay for this.
>
> To me, this is one of the infrastructural issues we should not lightly 
> postpone.
>
I think you need to go over the whole process and explain how it will 
work in real life.

Two simple examples

  a) I declare my schema to be foo.rnc, in oxygen notation. I am 
processing using XSL.
      in XSL I cannot read .rnc files (at all easily). how do I access 
the datatype info?

  b) I am moving hundreds of documents into eXist, and I pull out small 
fragments all
      the time. for each one, I laboriously find the header, find the 
way to referring to the
      schema, locate the schema, and look! I have 4 different schemas, 
so how now
      do I evaluate @value?

>
> You will need to check for the type before blindly processing them.
how? I'm an experienced XML processing person, and I just dread the
thought of considering it. Plus, I want my validation!
>
> Which will put a burden on you if you suddenly discover a new type of 
> dates in your texts to go back to the schema-drawing-room called Roma 
> for another round.
seems a reasonable price to me!
>
> Except that we still have the all-in-one proposal.  I might be biased 
> since I
> work more or less daily with xml:lang attributes, but that solution 
> has the advantage
> of being simpler technically.
and I claim its not at all simple for validators and processors...

sebastian