[tei-council] conformance draft

[Dan O'Donnell]

Picking this up by reading backwards--I'm still with the draft on this:

-This seems to me to be how we are supposed to do it, in keeping with
the proper use of namespaces
-If we can modify roma, we have a relatively painless way of dealing
with it
-Anybody who is in a position to be adding new elements is not a novice
and is going to be in a state to think up ways of making the task of
adding them to the relevant elements easier.

On Fri, 2007-23-03 at 16:18 +0000, James Cummings wrote:
> Syd Bauman wrote:
> 
> > jc:I'm jc:not jc:entirely jc:convinced jc:that jc:it jc:truly
> > jc:impairs jc:human jc:readability. jc:Having jc:a jc:few
> > jc:namespace jc:prefixes jc:might jc:actually jc:clarify jc:things
> > jc:more.
> 
> Surely that would be more accurate as:
> 
> <jc:p> I'm not entirely convinced that it truly impairs human <sb:seg>TEI
> beginners</sb:seg> readability .</jc:p>  :-)
> 
> I actually found the example quite readable, maybe I'm weird.
> 
> > Yes, of course, name collision is annoying, and we'd prefer to avoid
> > it. But on the scale of problems someone has merging TEI vocabularies
> > or getting one project's files to be interoperable with another
> > project's software, name collision is extremely low on the list of
> > difficulties. (And it's quite rare, to boot.)
> 
> I agree. Worries over namespace collisions isn't the only reason to be doing
> this.  Yes, they might be a problem, but I'm more convinced of the fact that we
> are choosing to put TEI in a namespace.  If we are choosing to do that, then we
> should use them properly, and I don't think allowing anyone to add new elements
> to that namespace is really using them properly.
> 
> > So I see these as reasons to permit a user to separate her additions
> > via namespace, perhaps even to encourage her to do so. 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"); or worse yet, to risk having an administrator worry
> > that, like copyright infringement, it's illegal to add elements in
> > the TEI namespace ... all for a limited technical gain that may never
> > occur, seems like a bad idea.
> 
> Firstly, let's not make 'create his own namespace' into more than it is... if
> Roma were edited as Sebastian suggests to provide a namespace, etc., then the
> barrier isn't that high.  Ok, there is still a barrier on 'deal with multiple
> namespace issues' for his one element.
> 
> On the phone it has been suggested to me that a compromise might be something
> like this:
> 
> a) Remove mentions of namespaces from the definition of TEI Conformance.
> b) Include that the document must validate against one of the schema categories
> listed in order to be conformant.
> c) Add a new category which is
> 'extension-but-doesn't-use-TEI-namespace-for-new-elements'.
> d) Add new-elements-in-new-namespace-requirement to a definition of 'TEI
> Interchange Format'
> 
> An alternative possibility is to leave namespace-for-new-elements as a concept,
> but not a requirement for conformance, and instead make it a requirement for
> 'TEI Interchange Format', but provide users an easy route to gain this to show
> their funding bodies.  I.e. Roma or a Roma-like tool reads an ODD and will
> generate non-colliding schemas that use no-namespace for local processing, and
> one which uses namespaces and an XSLT which will transform document instances
> that validate against the no-namespace version into documents with namespaces.
> While I think we should be providing as much help in this area as possible, I am
> not sure this promotes best practice.
> 
> Part of the problem is that funding bodies want to see funded projects using
> 'the best' method possible.  While often this sense of 'best' is based entirely
> on misunderstandings, if we have TEI Conformance, and then TEI Conformance+TEI
> Interchange Format, they'll probably just view that as better and require it.
> 
> -James
> 
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative <http://www.tei-c.org/>
Director, Digital Medievalist Project <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
Associate Professor and Chair of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox: +1 403 329 2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191
Homepage: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/