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

[Christian Wittern]

Sorry, folks -- this seems to have gone only to LB, not the Council list 
where it was intended to.

Christian


Christian Wittern wrote:
> Lou Burnard wrote:
>> Does no-one else on the Council have a view on this issue? Or is 
>> everyone already on holiday?
> 
> We are a global organization, so you should at least let pass 24 hrs 
> before any cry of desparation.  But I agree that we need more input on 
> this important matter.
> 
>>
>> 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? 
> 
> Maybe its survey-monkey time again?
> I remember us saying that we will continue to maintain P4 for those who 
> need it for some reason, but will pipe new developments into P5 without 
> too much consideration for how this will brake peoples *current* 
> systems.  Well, this was some years ago.
> 
> With P5 now so deep into namespaces, data validation etc., we have moved 
> pretty much away from things possible in DTDs.  Because of editing 
> support, we should continue to offer pre-a-porter DTDs for those who 
> don't want to dress up, but I do not think we should continue to support 
> the customization mechanism of P4.  If we do not let go of this now, it 
> will be a big headache down the road, since we stopped ourselve from 
> removing it later in the P5 product cycle.
> 
>> 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. 
> 
> We will do them a mis-service.  They will want to grow up and live on 
> equal footing in XML-Land, so they need to wrap their heads around this 
> stuff.  We should mildly encourage them to do so.
> 
>> 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
> 
> My course would be: do (a), forget about (b) and either mention (c) in a 
> footnote or point to some white paper on the TEI website that explains 
> how to do that, clearly marked as advanced material.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Hmm.  I read the I in TEI as Interchange and think it is not really our 
> business to think about what people should or should not do in the 
> privacy of their own hard-drives.
> 
>>
>> 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.
> 
> Hopefully Sebastian thinks about this while we speak.
> 
>>
>> 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.
> 
> So maybe you could use your time to attend to other pressing matters and 
> produce the prose once we reached agreement over this?  I think that 
> would be better use of our scarce ressources.
> 
> All the best, "no holidays in sight" Christian
> 
> 


-- 

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