[tei-council] time is running out ... <measure> and <ps>

Conal Tuohy conal.tuohy at vuw.ac.nz
Mon Jul 30 19:38:51 EDT 2007


On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 13:53 -0400, Syd Bauman wrote:
> On <ps>
> -- ----
> As per council's request in Berlin, rather than checking <ps> into
> P5, I ripped it out and made a stand-alone ODD of it
> (http://www.tei-c.org/Drafts/ps/). The ostensible point of this
> exercise was that having an element to encode postscripts is
> controversial enough that it was too scary for me to check it
> directly into P5. This means, IMHO, that we need an explicit vote to
> include this element in P5 or not. I think we need to make this
> decision ASAP.
> 
> So far Sebastian has said he thinks it should go in, and Lou has
> tangentially implied that he doesn't. I am in favor of including it. 

I am all in favour of <ps>. Let's have it, please!

> On <measure> et al.
> -- --------- -- ---
> I think the current situation is broken. I am quite confident, e.g.,
> that at least 2 of the projects I work with at Brown would re-define
> <measure> (to be roughly what it used to be) rather than use it as it
> is now.
> 
> * The <measure> element should have a quantity= attribute, not
>   extent= (and preferably not count=, although that's a lot better
>   than extent=).

I agree "quantity" is a more suitable word.

> * <measure> should not have a scope= attribute (unless someone wants
>   to put in some work figuring out what a scope= might usefully mean
>   for a generic <measure>).

I don't understand the issue here. Why is @scope out of scope? :-)

> * The "suggested values include" list for unit= of <measure> should
>   be pretty much as all-encompassing as we can get it.

As others have mentioned, this list would be prohibitively large. I
suggest we give a few examples of SI units, and perhaps 1 or 2 ISO 4217
currency codes, and leave it at that. IMHO it would be good to include
an example in which obsolete units are re-expressed in modern units,
e.g.

<measure unit="J" quantity="1.35581795">1 foot-pound</measure>

> * The <height>, <width>, and <depth> elements should not have a
>   commodity= attribute.

agree

> * The <height>, <width>, and <depth> elements should have a scope=
>   attribute (they currently do; the point of my saying this is to
>   contrast it with <measure>).

why? 

It seems to me that @scope is in no way tied to the concept of distance,
but perhaps I'm missing something?

> * The "suggested values include" list for unit= of <height>, <width>,
>   and <depth> should be very limited (the list that is currently
>   there looks good to me; again the point of mentioning this is that
>   it is very different from unit= of <measure>, for which the current
>   list seems inappropriate to me).
> 
> * The amount attribute on <height>, <width>, and <depth> could be
>   named quantity= or extent=, or for that matter, value=.

I like @extent but I'm not fussed

> In addition, I think that <measureGrp> should not have text content.
> If Council is persuaded by Lou's arguments as to why it should have
> textual content ("As I remember the discussion, we recognises that
> most institutions would always supply dimensions in their own
> specific sequence, and might not want therefore to tag the height
> etc. explicitly. Compare the <geo> element, which just knows that you
> give lat and long in that order.") rather than my counter argument
> (which boils down to "for consistency grouping elements should not
> have textual content, and <geo> is a poor model, as it is poorly
> defined"), then we should come up with a different name, like
> <measurements> or <measurementSet>.

sure



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