[tei-council] MD chapter revised: namespace rules

[Daniel O'Donnell]

Good enough. I don't feel it strongly and the renamed elements are the
only ones that I thought might be in the same space. But then we need to
redefine the principle. It is not "clean" but not change for element
names that we allow in the same namespace then?

On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 13:39 +1200, Conal Tuohy wrote:
> 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
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada
Vox: +1 403 329-2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191