[tei-council] MD chapter revised: namespace rules

[Conal Tuohy]

On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 09:02 -0600, Dan O'Donnell wrote:

> The use of the TEI namespace says: "I am identical to or have been
> cleanly modified from the TEI standard; you can process me with the
> assurance that you understand what I am"--i.e. the question of whether
> something stays in the namespace is not only a negative decision
> identifying elements that have diverged from the standard, but a
> positive one identifying elements that have not. So under this, cleanly
> renamed elements would remain in the namespace, even if that adds a
> processing cost in figuring out what they are an alias of. 

I don't think this can work, really. IMHO if an element is renamed, it
MUST go into a different namespace. Remember, the namespace URI is an
identifier for a vocabulary. If you rename a TEI element, e.g. renaming
<div> to <chapter>, then you are using a different vocabulary from the
TEI standard, and you should use a different namespace URI. Otherwise,
if I rename <text> to <chapter>, how can we tell whether your <chapter>
and my <chapter> elements are the same?

> If we take the view that the TEI namespace is a positive assertion, then
> translations are a bit of an issue: presumably they are by definition
> clean modifications (except that unlike modifications of individual
> elements, there is always the possibility that individual translated
> elements might conflict with English language ones)

Indeed there would be that possibility, because the English-based TEI
vocabulary and the other non-English TEI translations are by definition
different vocabularies. But we simply must not allow this possibility -
we mustn't define a namespace in which names are ambiguous. Hence we
must have distinct namespaces for the localised TEI tagsets.

> , in which case they
> should under principle 3 be in the TEI namespace. We don't want
> translations by implication or practice to be or be seen as
> substantively different from the standard in anyway. 

I suggest that we need to "bite the bullet" and define official TEI
namespaces for all the translated versions.

Con