[tei-council] MD chapter revised: namespace rules

[Daniel O'Donnell]

On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 17:30 +0100, James Cummings wrote:
> Lou Burnard wrote:
> > In message <1176303249.4952.3.camel at caedmon> daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca writes:
> >>> I was suggesting that TEI Conformant documents could have renamings in the
> >>> TEI namespace, as long as they could be reverted according to the
> >>> information in the referenced ODD.  And then TEI Interchange Format would
> >>> insist that any such renamings be reverted before interchange.
> >> This is what I understood as well.
> > OK, it's time to get radical. What do we need "TEI Interchange format" for? Why
> > do we need to define it at all?
> > 
> > TEI-conformant documents must be valid XML and must have an ODD. Why do we need
> > to go beyond that?
> > 
> > So far after much scratching of heads, I don't think I have come up with any
> > need for the concept beyond the possibility of non-TEI names cluttering up the
> > namespace (which I also think we have now agreed to get rid of).
> 
> In my mind it was solely there to insist on TEI Pure Subset versions of 
> documents for interchange.  I.e. to revert all renamings etc.
> 
> I suppose that idea still *could* have some small merit, in that if I 
> have renamed tei:div[@type='chapter'] to my:chapter then in a TEI 
> Interchange Format it would, one assume be renamed back.  This is why I 
> never viewed renaming changes as being as dirty as content model 
> changes...there was always a possibility of them being switched back. 
> Once you change the content model you can't really do that in most 
> cases.  Does that mean those documents should never be interchanged? 
> No, of course not.  Thus, TEI Interchange Format really becomes 
> meaningless, just another way to say TEI Pure Subset.
> 
> > The keen eyed readers amongst you will have noticed that chapter IN has now
> > disappeared from P5. I see no need to bring it back, since it is of purely
> > antiquarian interest.
> > 
> > So, TEI Conformant documents are ipso facto in the interchange format. End of
> > story. We don't need to worry about non TEI conformant (but interchangeable) XML
> > documents.
> 
> I think I can agree with that now.\

My only question is why to we discuss renaming elements as distinct from
just creating new ones at all then?  I.e. why raise the possibility at
all? It sounds like we now have the following principles:

1) Only official TEI subsets and translations or clean subsets thereof
may use the official TEI namespaces
2) All new or renamed elements, attributes, or non-clean modifications
of elements or attributes, must be in a user defined namespace.

> 
> -James
> 
> 
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Department Chair and Associate Professor of English
Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org/

Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox +1 403 329-2377
Fax +1 403 382-7191
Email: daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca
WWW: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/