[tei-council] the "key" attribute

[Conal Tuohy]

On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 23:00 -0400, Syd Bauman wrote:
> SR>   - change att.naming to remove @key and put in @ref as pointer
> SR>     instead
> 
> I am not in favor. I don't mind renaming @key, but I think its
> functionality has to stay.[1] E.g., the US LOC may have changed
> recently, but as of a few years ago you could not access an LOC name
> authority record via a URI.

I think it's still true that you can't "access" an LoC name record via a
URL, but it's certainly possible to encode a Library of Congress Control
Number (LCCN) in a URI, in a standard way:

e.g. "info:lccn/n2002153210" is the URI for a certain Syd Bauman.

Disappointingly, on the LoC web page for this record (I won't post a
more specific URL than http://authorities.loc.gov/ because their rubbish
URLs don't persist from one moment to the next) the LCCN is nowhere
presented in the form of an "info" URI. However, I believe that using
the "info" URI scheme is the recommended practice for URI-encoding of
LCCN identifiers.

This URI does not have a well-defined resolution mechanism, however, it
is still a valuable standard, and a useful key for Syd Bauman.