[tei-council] rules about renaming

Mon Apr 2 19:26:48 EDT 2007

On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 23:36 +0100, Lou Burnard wrote:
> If I want to rename a TEI element, I am obviously required not to use as 
> the new name an existing name in the schema. Slightly less obviously, I 
> cannot use as the new name any name from any module I might want to 
> include in some other schema for the same document.
> 
> I cannot, for example, rename <p> as <q> if I am already using or plan 
> to use <q>.
> 
> But what about names which happen to look the same in different languages?
> 
> For example, suppose the French for "p" were "q"... would the presence 
> of the xml:lang attribute here be enough to make the following valid:
> 
> <elementSpec ident="p" mode="change">
> <altIdent xml:lang="FR">q</altIdent>
> </elementSpec>
> 
> and if not, does this mean that all identifiers share the same name space?
> 
> I rayther suspect they have to....

I think you're right. 

In my earlier response to the conformance draft I suggested that the
localised TEI schemas should have their own namespace URIs, too,
because, as you point out, sharing a common namespace across all natural
languages is, on the face of it, running a risk that names will collide.

My suggestion to mitigate this risk was that we publish distinct
namespace URIs for each language into which the TEI vocabulary is
translated, in addition to the existing one for the standard
<soCalled>English</soCalled> TEI: 

http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0

I suggest that the namespace URI for every localised version should have
the same base URI as above, but also include a fragment identifier to
point to part of the page. So, for instance, the hypothetical French
TEI, in which <q> means <p>, might have this namespace URI:

http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0#fr 

If we did this we also ought to modify the HTML page at
http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0 to include an element with an id of "fr",
perhaps like so:

<html>
<body>
<p>This document describes the namespaces of the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI).</p>
<p>The namespace whose URI is "http://www.tei-c.org/P5/" identifies the
primary TEI vocabulary described in the <a
href="http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/">TEI
Guidelines.</a></p>

<h2>Localised versions</h2>
<p>The primary TEI vocabulary is largely based on English, but it has
also been localised into other languages. Encoders who are more fluent
in one of these languages may wish to use one of these alternative
vocabularies.</p>
<ul>
	<li id="fr">française</li>
	<!-- etc -->
</ul>
</body>
</html>

These list items should, where possible, contain pointers to information
about the localised versions (e.g. to the relevant guidelines document,
ODDs, or whatever was the most appropriate.)

Con