[tei-council] Glosses, glosses, everywhere, and what do you all think?

[James Cummings]

Syd Bauman wrote:
> I was unable to close TRAC ticket 338 because the server was not
> responding in a timely fashion, if at all. The machine does respond
> to pings just fine, though.
> 
> ---------
> 
> Should "gi" (as in <gi>, gi= of <tagUsage>, locus="gi" of <certainty>
> or <respons>) be glossed as "generic identifier" or as "element
> name"?

Generic identifier.

> ---------
> 
> data.outputMeasurement has the gloss "HTML dimension". See
> http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/ref-data.outputMeasurement.html.
> Some thoughts:
> 
> * I think there should be some examples in there: most people don't
>   casually read regular expressions the way many of us do. I plan to
>   add some soon.
> 
> * The gloss is clearly not right. This datatype is currently only
>   used for width= and height= of <graphic> and <binaryObject>. But
>   does it need a gloss? Should its name be changed instead (or in
>   addition)?

I'd remove the gloss entirely.

> We gave the ident= of <language> its name in order to parallel the
> ident= of <elementSpec>, <valItem>, etc. I don't wonder if a more
> semantically appropriate name would be better. RFC 3066 and its
> successor RFC 4646 call the thing they describe (which is the value
> of ident= of <language>) a "tag". Back when we were setting this up I
> thought that tag= was too confusing a name for an attribute. But now
> I'm not so sure. It seems better than ident=. Could use langTag= or
> languageIdentifier= or rfc4646= (ick), I suppose. 

I don't find @ident confusing or too inappropriate.  Most people won't know the 
RFCs use 'tag' and may get confused by other meanings of tag?

> Note that for <langKnown> we use tag= ('cause there's only one), and
> for <langKnowledge> we use tags= ('cause there's likely more than
> one). So I'm leaning towards tag=.

Or rename those ident. ;-)    Wile I have no problem with ident, if tag is more 
consistent, I don't really have any strong objections to that, only a mild 
unease because of the way 'tag' is used.

-James

> 
> I did not gloss "hand" as in @hand, <hand>, <handList>, <handShift>,
> etc. Speak up if you think it should be glossed (and say what the
> gloss should be).

Seems obvious to me.

> Does anyone have strong opinions about whether proper nouns like
> "World Geodetic System" should be glossed with initial caps or not?

Most uses of it in prose tend to be capitalised, but I would guess this is down 
to the editorial style guide.

> The most amusing gloss I deleted was that for 'model.recordingPart',
> which read "dates and date ranges". :-)

Oops.  And still does on the last stable release.  Interesting that no one has 
pointed that out! 
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/ref-model.recordingPart.html

My thoughts, for what they are worth,

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