[tei-council] NH

[Sebastian Rahtz]

I just had a quick read; its interesting, but I do feel that the message
it hands over is a bit odd. It seems to tell me generally that if I want to
do non-hierarchical stuff, I should not use the TEI; which is not
an uninteresting thing to say, but does not belong here.

Thus most of the examples in 21.3 do not use TEI markup, but
made-up stuff which looks a bit like TEI, which I find confusing.
It says cheerfully "The TEI may be customized (using the methods described
in 24.2 Personalization and Customization 
<http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/P5/Guidelines-web-beta/en/html/USE.html#MD>) 
to support this method of encoding
non-hierarchical structures." But if these are good things to do,
why are they not in the core TEI? Why do we give with one hand
and take away with the other? Why do we promote non-conformant
markup? at least the examples could have been TEI with extra
elements in a different namespace?

Too much of this reads more like a paper given at a conference
about theoretical markup than a chapter in  reference Guidelines :-}

With regard to the examples at the front in German and Italian,
they are definitely incongruous. How hard can it be
to find an example of poetry in English where the linguistic
structure is different from the lines? any old bit of Shakespeare
will do. Its not even as if the poetry given is especially a good
demonstration.  Using the Schiller to discuss
"The third view, which we will call the vocal view, is concerned with direct
speech or quotations" seems pretty articifial to me.

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      

Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431