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

James Cummings James.Cummings at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Sat Apr 14 07:56:05 EDT 2007


Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> on. I am not sure I see a clear conclusion as to whether we continue to 
> generate
> the DTD and RELAX NG modules for those who don't give a dang about
> conformance.

I feel this is optional but nice -- does it take much effort to produce 
them?  Yes they can be used as you describe below, but I don't think 
that is reason to no produce them if this is done automatically.

> Can I introduce you to someone?  This person (let's call him Wohann :-})
> shuns ODD entirely, and maintains his customization by writing
> a wrapper RELAX NG schema which does just what he wants, pulling
> in bits of TEI RELAX NG schemas. It is readable,
> documented, efficient and expressive. He uses extra features of RELAX NG
> or other ISO DSDL standards to manage his documents to a high standard.
> He is, you may say, non-conformant. He cannot show his "workings"
> in the approved form, and gets an F.

Students are customers these days and thus rarely receive Fs.  He would 
be given some credit for his obvious understanding of the system.  I'd 
give him a C- or a D. :-)

> HOWEVER, when you get Wohann's document,
> it validates fine against tei_all. If he could be bothered, he could write
> an ODD equivalent of his hand-crafted schema, and the document would
> validate against that too. The document validates against _many_ schemas,
> and breaks no TEI semantic or syntactic rules. It adds no new elements
> or does any renaming, or breaks any models.

Sounds like the document is conformant, even if his schema is not a 
conformantly created one.

> So two questions:
> 
> a) Can Wohann put the "TEI Conformant" badge on his web site, by the 
> fiction
> that his ODD is the implicit tei_all? Even though he and all his workers
> use the evil little hand-crafted schema, and the document contains a PI
> linking to that?

Yes. Wohann's documents are conformant with reference to the tei_all ODD 
and schemas.  This situation is also true of all TEI Pure Subset 
Schemas... they do not *need* to provide their ODD because they can 
claim they are using tei_all (or another existing subset like tei_lite 
if it contains the entirety of their subset).  They are encouraged to 
provide their ODD as documentation and use ODD to customise the TEI to 
constrain it to their purposes.  But this is like taking your 
non-namespaced non-conformant documents and then adding in the namespace 
-- Conformance has nothing to say on how your documents got to the state 
they are in, simply whether they are conformant at the point or not.

> b) do we encourage/support/allow Wohann's working method by generating
> the schemas for him?

I'm ambivalent about that.  If it is a pain to do, then let's not, 
knowing Wohann's skills I'm sure he could do this himself, if it isn't a 
pain to do this, then I don't see that doing so really affects the 
conformance message.  There are always other non-conformant ways to do 
things which may end up in giving you Conformant documents.

> Or I am just going the mulberry bush again?

Always useful to check for needed pruning.

-James



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