[tei-council] Glosses, glosses, everywhere, and what do you all think?
Lou Burnard
lou.burnard at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Thu Jul 5 05:19:54 EDT 2007
Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Lou Burnard wrote:
>>
>>
>> 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.
> the example for <tag> is <tag>hi rend="it"</tag>, which is short hand for
> <code><hi rend="it"></code>; which is not quite the same
> as <gi>teiHeader</gi>. You might use the latter for making an index entry,
> for instance.
>
> so constraining <gi> to force you to use <tag> when you mean <code>
> looks like a good thing, but
> it does not stop the simple abuse of <tag>teiHeader</tag>.
>
> <tag> seems like the one to drop, if at all.
>
You are simply re-stating the intended difference between the two
elements, which is not at issue here. My observation is that people do
not think the distinction is worth making, with the consequence that
both forms of abuse (<tag>foo</tag> and <gi>foo bah="humbug"</gi>) are
quite commonplace. And if you say to someone "what is that thing with
pointy brackets round it" they will say "it's a tag" without thinking
about its components.
Is anyone sane ever going to want to do
<tag><gi>foo</gi> <att>bar</att>=<val>humbug</val></tag>
I doubt it. Which means that by introducing a distinction between a tag
that contains just a gi (<gi>foo</gi>) and one that contains something
else as well (<tag>foo bah="humbug"</tag>) we've obscured one of the
occurrences of <gi>foo</gi> for index making purposes.
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