[tei-council] Conformance draft: namespace purity

Tue Apr 3 20:58:37 EDT 2007

Syd Bauman wrote:
> 
> 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. 

This seems like splitting hairs, but since the null-namespace is 
certainly not a TEI namespace, I would think this is licensed by the 
current draft.

> 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>

This is not what you will do.  You will add a 
xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" to the TEI element above and then 
get the following:

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

This is if we allow a null namespace, which seems reasonable to me, 
otherwise you will get <sb:thingy>the thing</sb:thingy> which seems nice 
to me as well.

The downside of this of course is that it will need to jump some through 
some hoops in DTD land where you have to emulate namespaces with 
prefixes and or #FIXED attributes.

> 
> 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.

The annoying part starts only if you want to process this, but even 
there you could argue it is entirely reasonable to have to deal with 
your own stuff yourself and this namespace business helps you separate 
your stuff from their stuff.

Christian

-- 

  Christian Wittern
  Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
  47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN