[tei-council] MD chapter revised: namespace rules

Lou Burnard lou.burnard at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Thu Apr 12 19:46:53 EDT 2007


Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>
> Tite proposes (eg) <sup> as syntactic sugar for <hi rend="sup">.
> I think you are saying that <sup> will have to be either <sup 
> xmlns="......">
> or <x:sup>, where "x" is defined up front. Given the usage of <sup>,
> you _will_ end up doing one or other on every occasion, at a minimum
> extra cost of 4 characters per use (start and end tag).
That is correct.

> Given that
> the aim is to save money, it does seem undesirable.

The aim of the TEI is not to make the smallest possible tagset. If you 
want small tags and few keystrokes, you can't be TEI conformant. It 
doesn't mean you can't have a jolly good schema, nor indeed one that 
can't be automatically made TEI conformant. (James proposed a special 
name for such a beast, which I've now forgotten).  Have you *read* the 
draft yet?

>
> Me, I think that if <sup> has an <equiv> doing the mapping,
> it can stay in the TEI namespace, but I still haven't read the discussion
> of you lot over Easter.
>
But that mapping isn't accessible to anyone's normal document processing 
tools is it? We don't have TEIFORM anymore. Of course if you can whip 
out of the bag some foolproof way of implementing something equivalent 
using standard XML processing tools, I'll stop complaining...

> As Syd says, no sane Tite user would pay for <x:sup> over <sup>,
> so Tite won't conform; unlike Lite, which _will_ be OK.
>
If the primary objective of Tite (or any schema) is to save keystrokes, 
then TEI conformance/interoperability is going to be a secondary 
objective for it.
(I Dont see what Lite has to do with the price of fish)




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