[tei-council] conformance draft

Thu Mar 22 21:39:58 EST 2007

James Cummings wrote:

> I recognise that 
> it creates a barrier to use of the customisation mechanism.  

That's perhaps true, in the first instance.

However, it can also make customisation much easier.

If a customisation has been made using a namespace then it will be
easier to combine with other customisations.

I envisage a situation where encoders may pick a set of 2 or 3 existing
customisations want to combine them together. Perhaps an
"image-annotation" customisation might be mixed with a "CIDOC-ontology"
customisation, an "AppInfo" customisation, or whatever. If these
customisations used namespaces, then they could be combined more or less
just by sticking them together. 

Whereas if they did not use namespaces, they might produce name
collisions, and it would be necessary to resolve the conflicts, and
define a new customisation independently. 

In summary, the non-use of namespaces tends to make customisations
non-reusable, and makes document interchange harder.

> I'm not entirely 
> convinced that it truly impairs human readability.  Having a 
> few namespace 
> prefixes might actually clarify things more.  I'm entirely 
> used to xml:id now as 
> an attribute.  

I agree. It may be seen as added clutter, but it may also be seen as a
useful visual hint: if an encoding project has defined a new attribute,
it's because they have some special requirement. Having a namespace
prefix may help to draw their attention to the attribute, making it
easier to find when reading the TEI. This is certainly my own
experience.

In any case, if namespace prefixes are seen as a barrier, then a
customisation can rename ALL the TEI elements into a new namespace, and
then add new elements to that namespace. Instance documents could then
use a default namespace to qualify names, so there'd be no need for
namespace prefixes. e.g.

<TEI xmlns="tag:www.nzetc.org,2007:my-example-namespace">
	<teiHeader>
		<myAdditionalSomethingDesc>
			...
		</myAdditionalSomethingDesc>
	</teiHeader>
	<body>
		<gloop/>
	</body>
	...
</TEI>

i.e. a "renaming extension" schema. 

Cheers

Con