[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>&lt;hi rend="it"&gt;</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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