[tei-council] recording application information in the teiHeader

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Lou Burnard wrote:
>
> 2. As a tool developer I can report that xaira certainly needs a place 
> in the header to store quite a lot of data: much more than this 
> proposal would  permit (and with a more complex structure) in fact.  
> Xaira addresses the need by defining its own additional "XairaDesc" 
> element (if I were doing this properly it wd be in its own namespace) 
> and adding same to the encodingDesc, which works just fine. In an 
> earlier version, xaira also updated the revisionDesc everytime it ran: 
> however this rapidly became so annoying I took it out again.
>
OK, having also immediately heard from Peter Boot and Dot, the case is 
probably there for it to
exist. The choice is between:  a simple extensible mechanism which needs 
careful definition
to let Lou use it;  and a technique recommendation which says "define 
your own vocabulary
in your own namespace". 

This business of "when to namespace and when not to namespace" keeps 
coming back
to haunt us...

I'll let this stew a bit on TEI-L, and then make you a proposal.

Incidentally, perhaps I am over-influenced by my work for the W3C, but I 
like
the separation there between the standard, and the "best practices"
document to go with it. I suppose it is heresy to say that we could do 
with that too?

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      

Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

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