[tei-council] rendition, rend, and style

[David J Birnbaum]

Dear Arianna (cc Lou, Council),

I agree completely that we may need to tag information according to 
interpretive categories, but since @rend is supposed to be about 
rendering and interpretive categories are not essentially about 
rendering (although we may, of course, ultimately render different 
interpretive categories differently in certain views of our data), I 
don't think @rend is the right attribute semantically. To press 
something intended to indicate rendering into service as an indicator of 
interpretive categories that are not essentially about rendering 
suggests tag abuse. If we don't already have a way to flag interpretive 
categories, I'd certainly support implementing one. It's a very 
important need; my only objection is that @rend is the wrong way to 
address it.

Cheers,

David

Arianna Ciula wrote:
> I totally agree with what David says about the meaning of @rend for 
> not born digital material.
>
> As far as born digital material regard though, I can imagine the 
> situation where someone wants to differentiate the semantics (not big 
> or small, but myIntrepret_category1 and myIntrepret_category2) of the 
> information so that some style could be applied - possibly - later on. 
> We should remember that in some cases the people who do the markup are 
> not bothered (should they be?) about what style is going to be applied 
> to their documents, but they do want to differentiate between 
> different things that may need a different visualisation. So while I 
> can see the advantages of a good practice in pointing @rend to 
> <rendition> in the header for born digital material, I am still not 
> sure this is the only use we should support for @rend in this case.
>
> Arianna
>
> Lou's Laptop wrote:
>> Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>>> If @rend says it is for source description only,
>>> then my born-digital document
>>> can't use it.
>> Hmm, I may be logic chopping here, but I don't think I agree. If your 
>> doc is born digital, then you *are* describing the source when you 
>> say @rend=sup, surely?
>>
>> Maybe this is one of the points that needs more careful elaboration. 
>> Can we imagine a case where @rend in a born-digital document does not 
>> describe how it should be rendered? @rend="done in emacs without 
>> benefit of markup" doesnt seem very likely.
>>
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