[tei-council] conformance draft

[James Cummings]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Well, yes, I am not that happy about it. Just call me Wendell.
> Seems like painting ourselves into a corner, to throw
> away the chance of customing it with RELAXNG fragments.

Other than painting ourselves into a corner, can you explain to me why this
is such a bad thing?  Surely this customising can still be done with
RELAXNG inside an ODD?

>>  With other
>> guidelines/standards, if you took one part of it and ignored how it was
>> meant to be done and did it an entirely different way, you'd recognise
>> that
>> you might not have support, interoperability, or 'certification' or
>> whatnot.  
> note that you don't use the word "conformance" there.

That's because most of the other standards I've looked at don't have a
definition of conformance in the way we do.  This is because, I believe,
most other standards set out one way, and one way only, for you to do
things.  The idea of you adding to, expanding, renaming, and otherwise
customising the standard are entirely foreign to most of them.  TEI's
liberality in allowing customisation is simultaneously its greatest
strength and greatest barrier to mass-adoption.  In most standards there
seems to be a one-to-one relationship, "it validates against the schema and
you've put the suggested information in the right place, then you are
Conformant".  i.e. they conflate conformance and validity.

> I won't go to the stake on this, though.

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk