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

[Syd Bauman]

While on the face of it Lou's suggestion (mention all 3 methods of
generating a complete TEI schema: via ODD, parametrized DTD, or
stitching RNG) seems quite reasonable, Arianna's point that we would
then need to make sure SG explained both DTDs and RNG enough to do
this is a strong argument against, IMHO.

SG should not mention details of DTDs at all. (And yes, Lou,
stripping 'em out is still on my plate). Nor should the rest of the
Guidelines rely on DTD syntax at all.

There are lots of non-conformant methods of making a schema that will
validate TEI documents that could be conformant.[1] I do not think
the Guidelines themselves should discuss any of them. The Guidelines
are already daunting enough. Why add large sections of potentially
confusing information that will likely be used by an extraordinarily
small number of users (perhaps 0), to explain something that isn't
even conformant?

Again, a separate paper or HOWTO explaining this may be a good idea.


BTW, does anyone actually know how to go about stitching together the
RNG schema fragments in a manner that permits similar capabilities to
using parametrized DTDs? We would have to figure out how to do it
(although, because this is not conformant, I daresay we do not have
to figure out how to do it optimally), do extensive testing, and
write up a serious chunk of prose instructions. 


Notes
-----
[1] E.g. (untested):

namespace tei = "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"

attrs = attribute xml:id { xsd:ID }
p = element tei:p { text }
start =
  element tei:TEI {
    attrs,
    element tei:teiHeader {
      attrs,
      element tei:fileDesc {
        attrs,
        element tei:titleStmt {
          attrs,
          element tei:title { attrs, text }
        },
        element tei:publicationStmt { attrs, p+ },
        element tei:sourceDesc { attrs, p+ }
      }
    },
    element tei:text {
      attrs,
      element tei:body { attrs, p+ }
    }
  }