[tei-council] question about <char>

Wittern Christian cwittern at gmail.com
Mon Apr 16 00:38:05 EDT 2007


Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
> Not being part of the earlier discussions, the main reason I can see for
> the g are
>
> 1) To provide a mechanism for describing non-unicode characters
> 2) To keep the content model of mapping the same whether the character
> is unicode or not.
>   

I had the impression, Lou's question was not about changing the content 
model, but rather specifically about the example we provide.

> Looking up mapping and g, and see the definition of mapping supports my
> hypothesis here, but the nomenclature and definition of g does not:
>
> In mapping:
>
>   
>> The <g> elements contained by this element can point to either another
>> <char> or <glyph>element or contain a character that is intended to be
>> the target of this mapping.
>>     
The "pointing" to <char> and <glyph> is done via a <g> element.  What 
this comes down to is that the content is either a character used 
directly, or a <g> element, which represents a otherwise not 
representable character.    Mapping as such is used only within the 
structure of a <char> or <glyph> element to point to a related version 
of a character (for example from a lower case to a upper case version).

>
> In g:
>
>   
>> (character or glyph) represents a non-standard character or glyph.
>>     
> ...
>   
>> The name g is short for gaiji, which is the Japanese term for a
>> non-standardized character or glyph.[1]
>>     
The formulation is not ideal.   I now prefer to merge this with the one 
from Wikipedia:

"The name g is short for gaiji, which is the Japanese term for a character not included in a standard set of characters"

> Personally, I really like consistent content models for structures
> independent of specifics of the content--so I prefer requiring g for
> both standard and non-standard characters. But the name of g is
> misleading then in this case. Have we other places where you use cdata
> if the content is one thing and a structural element is the content is
> structurally the same thing but non-standard or the like?
>   
The <g> is special here in that it uses markup to represent a 
character.  In that sense, it is not comparable to other situations, I 
think.

Christian




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