[tei-council] Conformance .... the continuing saga

[Lou Burnard]

Does no-one else on the Council have a view on this issue? Or is 
everyone already on holiday?

Personally, I am reluctant to remove parametrisable schemas without a 
bit more consultation. I have no problem with saying that true TEI 
conformance necessitates production of an ODD. But I still feel we have 
an obligation to make it feasible for people to customize the system 
without using tools that only we provide. Which means that we need to 
continue to provide customizable fragments, and describe how they can be 
used. We *want* people to use TEI P5 at whatever level they feel 
comfortable, right? For people still in DTDworld, the old method of 
stitching together DTD fragments is just fine, and they can go on doing 
it without having to learn any of this newfangled namespace stuff. 
People who, by contrast, are hip to the RelaxNG groove will want to know 
how to plug TEI stuff into their production line without having to 
completely revise the whole shooting match. So my preferred course of 
action would be:

1. Revise MD to make explicit that there is more than one way of 
building a schema from the TEI Guidelines. In fact there are three:
(a) write an ODD and process it with a conformant ODD processor
(b) write a DTD subset using parameter entities and ting and ting
(c) write a Relaxng schema which combines TEI RelaxNG modules ad lib

2. Of these ways, only (a) is guaranteed to result in a schema which can 
be used to validate TEI conformance for your documents, but the others 
may be helpful for local use. So we provide suggested ways of doing 
them, in two distinct subsections of the document.

3. We need, urgently, a definition of what exactly a "conformant ODD 
processor" is supposed to do. This might include a description of what 
the current ODD processor does, but that is less important.

If, on consultation, it is apparent that no-one cares about (2) above, 
we can always throw away the lovingly-crafted prose I expect to be 
generating this weekend, or put it somewhere else... but I think we must 
have the consultation.