[tei-council] conformance draft

[Conal Tuohy]

I have read JC's "conformance" draft and I like it very much. Thanks James!

I have one comment there about the use of namespaces in "renaming" schemas. There is a kind of "loophole" there which I think should be tightened.

<term>Renaming subset schema</term> is defined on page 4
http://www.tei-c.org/Council/conformance-draft.pdf#page=4

The section on namespaces is on page 6
http://www.tei-c.org/Council/conformance-draft.pdf#page=6

If I read it correctly it seems to imply that Renaming Subset Schemas should have a special exemption to allow them to define new names in the TEI namespace, if it does so using <equiv> to relate them to existing elements. 

<quote>TEI-Conformant documents must not extend the TEI Namespace with additional elements and attributes except by means of a TEI Renaming Subset Schema produced from a TEI ODD file which properly documents the renamed elements or attributes through the use of the <equiv> element.</quote>
It seems to me that a schema which renames an existing TEI element should do so in a new namespace. The semantics of the renamed element are the same as before, of course, but I'm not sure that automatically implies that the new element should belong to the TEI namespace. The issue to me is whether we should allow anyone to add names to the TEI namespace, and the question of whether those names are just new names for old elements or new names for new elements is not really relevant. The relevant question, to my mind, is whether those names are defined by someone independently of the official TEI schema development process. My rule of thumb is: if multiple people are defining names in the same namespace, then they should be coordinated; if they are not coordinated, then they should use distinct namespaces, otherwise there is a risk of collision.

e.g. if I rename tei:div1 to tei:book, and someone else renames tei:text to tei:book, then we have a name collision. Whereas if I rename tei:div1 to my:book, and someone else renames tei:text to their:book then there's no conflation (assuming that my: and their: are prefixes bound to distinct namespace URIs, of course).

It is true that by using the ODD, it should be possible to convert an instance of a Renaming Subset Schema to regular TEI, and this is a way around the issue. NB this does require that the instance documents are linked to their ODD in some way, and we'd also need to actually have such an equiv-based translator (I assume this would be quite an easy task? has it been done?). NB if different namespaces were used, it would be possible to perform such translations on an instance document, even if they had no link to their ODD file, since it would be possible to recognise my:book and their:book by their namespace URIs, without having to refer to "my.odd" amd "their.odd".

On a similar subject: shouldn't the official TEI translations of element names also use distinct namespaces? e.g. "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0#es" for the Spanish translation? 

Cheers

Con