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

[Arianna Ciula]

Syd Bauman wrote:
 > 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.
 >

Probably I didn't explain myself properly. What I meant is that whatever 
you editors decide to do (e.g. leave or take out the references to the 
use of parameter entities to stitch DTD fragments in SG), this needs to 
be consistent with what you say in MD or in your HOWTo do paper. So, for 
instance, if there are references to the way you can stitch DTD 
fragments and not references to the way you would do the same with 
RelaxNG, this needs to be explained rather than left to the reader to 
figure out that the old DTD method is there because it was once used and 
supported by TEI.

 > 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?

I agree that it may be overwhelming to add all this prose on 
introductory chapters and, personally, I wouldn't mind if these 
explanations were confined somewhere else even outside the guidelines if 
that matters, but I do think they should be accessible and mentioned at 
least. In any case, I don't want to sound pedantic. At the end of the 
day, you have to write additional prose, so if adding this information 
takes time from more urgent stuff, I am totally in favour of postponing 
work on this.

Arianna


-- 
Dr Arianna Ciula
Research Associate
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS (UK)
Tel: +44 (0)20 78481945
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cc