[tei-council] xml table modeling

David J Birnbaum djbpitt+tei at pitt.edu
Fri Jul 20 15:48:28 EDT 2007


Dear TEI Council,

Some of you may remember that I woke up suddenly in the middle of one of 
the Berlin meetings and blurted out, with characteristic understatement, 
something about how the existing TEI table model is "all wrong" because 
it is too preoccupied with presentation, contradicting the general TEI 
(and XML) preference for descriptive markup. After the meetings I went 
home and did a bit of research and development, the results of which are at:

http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/2007_xml-tables/2007_xml-tables.html

I'll be presenting this at the Extreme Markup conference next month, but 
because we discussed some of the ideas in the Council meeting, even if 
only briefly, I thought some of you might be interested in seeing where 
it has led. I think this report introduces a useful mechanism for the 
descriptive modeling of tables, which is currently missing from the TEI 
guidelines, but I don't have a strong opinion about whether such a model 
should be incorporated into P5. In other words, this isn't a proposal 
that requires an official response from Council; it's just a report 
about an issue that arose in passing during our last meeting, which 
Council may or may not consider constructive, either in general or in 
the context of preparing P5 for release later this year.

For what it's worth, I think the impetus for both my proposed table 
model and my proposed stemma model is the same. Tables and stemmata both 
have conspicuous and distinctive graphic features that may distract us 
from truly descriptive markup,  by which I mean markup that is designed 
with an eye toward encoding the semantics of the object being modeled, 
irrespective of its physical appearance during rendering. Both the table 
model and the stemma model attempt to concentrate on descriptive markup 
in this sense.

Best,

David





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