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

[James Cummings]

Lou Burnard wrote:
>> Should "gi" (as in <gi>, gi= of <tagUsage>, locus="gi" of <certainty>
>> or <respons>) be glossed as "generic identifier" or as "element
>> name"?
> A more radical proposal which occurs to me this morning is that we
> should maybe merge this element with <tag> (and call it <tag>). Few have
> ever understood the distinction, and even in the text of the Guidelines
> I don't think it's applied consistently. Which suggests it's not a
> distinction really worth making.

This argues that the text of the Guidelines needs to be cleaned up and be
consistent.  Although it is a distinction that few choose to make, I think
it is still important in some cases. And the Guidelines would be the
use-case I'd suggest.  But, if it isn't really used there, or used
properly, then maybe tag isn't needed!  I'm quite sure gi is used.
Although it is a subtle distinction, I think it is important for the TEI to
preserve these, especially for those elements used in discussing markup
languages.

> Notwithstanding what I said above (about the confusing <tag> element), I
> am half inclined to agree. The other half of my inclination is to apply
> a different general principle, keep this as @ident, and make the current
> @tag/s into @key/s

I'm generally in favour of more @keys so don't see this as a bad thing.

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