[tei-council] Conformance draft: namespace purity

Tue Apr 3 09:53:06 EDT 2007

First, let me reiterate that I think we should permit conformant
documents to add elements in the TEI namespace. But given that we are
not going to permit that:

I think that James' stipulation in the draft that new elements
*must* be in a a non-TEI namespace might be a bit overstated --
perhaps we should *permit* null-namespace additions. 

BUT, it certainly shouldn't be the default. Remember that our target
audience includes (lots of) folks who are decidedly not XML experts.
Can you imagine the confusion of having to change

  <text>
    <body>
      <head>Blue</head>
      <p>My encoded text with the thing I am
      interested in encoding</p>
    </body>
  </text>

into

  <tei:text>
    <tei:body>
      <tei:head>Blue</tei:head>
      <tei:p>My encoded text with <thingy>the thing</thingy> I am
      interested in encoding</tei:p>
    </tei:body>
  </tei:text>

Just to add the one <thingy> element a user needs for some process or
other? How annoying. So annoying, BTW, that I think many, if not
most, people wouldn't do it even if we did require it.