[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
More information about the tei-council
mailing list