[tei-council] attribute names (was MD chapter revised: namespace rules)

James Cummings James.Cummings at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Sat Apr 14 17:23:34 EDT 2007


Lou's Laptop wrote:
> James Cummings wrote:
>>
>> erm, typo, I meant attributes.  I.e. we don't want someone creating a 
>> new attribute 'where' if possible because the TEI already defines one 
>> (on <move>), and we want to avoid confusion if possible.  Obviously 
>> @where added to tei:div and @where on tei:move are different, but 
>> since this is an addition of something new to the TEI, it shouldn't be 
>> in the the TEI namespace so should be @mynew:where.
> Just to be pernickety for a moment (moi!): attribute names on different 
> elements in the same namespace don't have to be distinct per XML. The 
> @where on tei:foo and the @where on tei:bar can have completely 
> different semantics and datatypes.  TEI *recommended practice* however 
> is that they ought to be the same. And if you put @myspace:where on  
> tei:foo it *has* to be the same thing as say a @myspace:where on 
> tei:bar, because there's no way of saying otherwise.

Yup, I understand and agree with all of that.  So by suggesting that 
people use namespaces for their new attributes we encourage the good 
practice that TEI already follows of not having @myspace:where mean 
something on one element and @myspace:where mean something else on 
another element.

-James





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