[tei-council] @reg on country

[James Cummings]

Hi there,

Now I know this problem might be about to disappear as @reg attributes
vanish in a puff of rationalisation, however in answering an enquiry about
placenames I had reason to look up the country element.  Currently the
country element has a @reg attribute whose data-type is {data.code}? where
data.code resolves to xsd:anyURI. See:

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/ref-country.html

What bothered me was that @reg is defined as supplying "a regularized form
of the country name using a name or code from ISO 3166".

However, since the datatype of reg is a URI, what the example:

<country reg="DK">Denmark</country>

means is that there is a file 'DK' that this element is point at.
So ok, it should be #DK and point to the places you've defined up in your
header or wherever.  But the problem with that is it ignores that this is a
fixed value list of codes from ISO 3166 and instead makes it a URI.  Just
seems wrong to me.

Roll on @ref (for those countries not defined by ISO3166) and cref (for
those which are, I'd say.

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk