[tei-council] conformance draft

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Syd Bauman wrote:
> sb:I sb:find sb:this sb:pretty sb:hard sb:to sb:swallow, sb:at
> sb:least sb:keeping sb:in sb:mind sb:that sb:the sb:target
> sb:audience sb:we're sb:talking sb:about sb:here sb:are sb:relative
> sb:beginners.
>   
I question this. A "relative beginner", if we have done
our job right, does NOT need to add new elements.
Yes, many projects will need to; yes, it is not evil;
but I still claim that it is not something to undertake
casually. The TEI out of the box should be able
to encode mainstream texts.

I would also claim that anyone doing text encoding
using XML is not a beginner. You can't go from
no experience at all in markup and XML  to TEI
customization involving new elements in one stage.

>  If you want to suck some of my files into
> your system, you are going to have deal with a *lot* worse than the
> fact that <duck> is a name collision. 
>   
your list is amusing and instructive :-}

Maybe we should get you to deliver
a "why the TEI is rubbish" talk at the MM!

.....


>  But to insist
> that the lone scholar studying Hispanic rhyming patterns in
> 17th-century manuscripts create his own namespace and deal with
> multiple namespace issues for the one element he wants to add to
> enhance his research (or lose the funding-helpful claim to "TEI
> Conformance")

I am coming around to believing that having to write
match="mytei:duck" instead of match="tei:duck" is
positively useful for maintenance purposes (I can quickly
spot where my code is for my elements only) and really
not that hard after all. your scholar has to learn to deal
with the xml namespace already, after all, and quite
possibly XInclude and xlink as well; better get the pain
over sooner.

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      

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