Fwd: [tei-council] rendition, rend, and style

[James Cummings]

Hi,

I've been away (still am), and have just now been wading through the discussion 
on @rend.

My thoughts so far are:

- @rend should only refer to the rendition in the original source

- @rend shouldn't be used to indicate output style (something else trapped in 
the xslt should, but I think I basically agree with David on purity of 
descriptive markup)

- @rend should be a datatype of one or more data.pointer which the Guidelines 
prose states should ideally be pointing to one or more <rendition> elements in 
the header of this or another document.  This should help create internal 
document consistency.

- I'd be tempted to do @rend="#bigFunnyLooking5" and then have a <ptr/> inside 
<rendition xml:id="bigFunnyLooking5"> to point to an external source for 
rendition information kept elsewhere. (rather than have 
@rend="http://www.example.com/foo/renditions.xml#bigFunnyLooking5" on various 
<hi> elements.  John's XIncluding is another solution.

- Importing @html:style is a use of namespaces I've been fearing -- I know 
people are going to do it, but I personally prefer to have little or no output 
style information in my TEI documents if possible.  But, since people are going 
to do it anyway, maybe the Guidelines should mention it.

- Importing @html:class isn't as necessary I think.  In most cases where I would 
want to do this the elements already have @tei:type which is more specific in 
terms of its semantics. (It applying to the type of that element, rather than a 
generalistic class regardless of element.)   I'd catch @tei:type in my xslt and 
provide style information there (or load it in from elsewhere), or base it on 
structure.

I'm sure I've missed or misunderstood some of the issues, but I've been 
ploughing through all the messages while on holiday ;-)

-James

John A. Walsh wrote:
> On May 10, 2007, at 2:59 PM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> 
>> Switching to rend="#italic" is quite attractive, especially
>> as it can refer to a common set of <rendition> elements,
>> eg rend="mymasterdocument.xml#italic". This matters,
>> cos if I write 3000 small web pages in TEI XML, I don't
>> want each one to have a <rendition> section. HOWEVER,
>> the overhead of rend="document.xml#italic" over
>> rend="italic" is pretty big, with lots of scope for error.
> 
> Sebastian, you raise a good point.  My current solution to this problem 
> is a common set of <rendition> elements that I include in all my 
> documents using XInclude.
> Perhaps this is obvious, but I think that if we go this direction, rend 
> should clearly provide pionters (plural) rather than a single pointer, 
> thus allowing rend="#bold #italic" and avoiding inane things like 
> rend="#bold_italic_underline".
> 
>>
>> Using pointers would break every processor of TEI documents,
>> but in an understandable way; I could cope with that,
>> after swallowing hard, but I fear the Goblin Rebellions
>> might seem like a picnic when we announce this.
>>
>> John, maybe you could lead some discussion on TEI-L?
> 
> TEI-L discussion is another good suggestion.  I'll do this.
> 
> John
>>
>> --Sebastian Rahtz
>> Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
>> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>>
> 
> 
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-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk