[tei-council] handy...

[Lou Burnard]

During today's call, Arianna reminded me that I still hadn't done 
anything about the current confusion surrounding the many ways of 
getting hand info into your document. You can put a <handList> 
(containing <hand>s) directly inside your <profileDesc>, or you can put 
one inside a <handDesc> inside a <physDesc> inside a <msDesc>. You can 
also put a <handNote> inside your <handDesc>. Or a mixture of 
<handList>s and <handNote>s.

This is confusing, to put it mildly.

Arianna suggests making <handNote> a child of <hand>, and then making 
<handDesc> contain either unwrapped <hand>s or <handList>s. This would 
mean you could still have <handList> as a child of <profileDesc> though 
she "would be tempted to eliminate this possibility to avoid confusion."

If we want to unify the listXXX elements, <handList> ought to become 
<listHand> and its content model ought to change accordingly.

Hmmmm. All very tricky.

The easiest solution (proposed, I think, by Matthew some time ago) would 
be simply to  abolish <handList> and <hand> completely, since they  
duplicate the function of <handDesc> and <handNote>. We could permit 
<handDesc> within <profileDesc> for those who don't want to  go through 
the business of doing a full msDesc just to document some hands  (though 
it's hard to imagine  why you'd want one without the other).

I've spent the last hour or so trying to think of some alternative to 
this Gordian solution, but not succeeded. Unless anyone has a better 
idea therefore, that's what I am going to do... but probably not till 
tomorrow.

If you've forgotten, the only difference between <hand> and <handNote> 
is that the former is empty, while the latter has para content. And 
<hand> has attributes
  @scribe,    @style   @ink  @first  @writing   @mainLang  @resp
while
<handNote> has attributes
 @scribe
 @script  [means same as hand at style]
 @medium [means same as hand at ink]
 @scope  [generalizes on hand at first]

Arianna proposes making a new class, att.handWriting, to contain these 
four, which seems useful, even if we abolish <hand>, since those who 
want to can then extend it.

The three attributes on <hand> but not <handNote> are probably 
dispensable: @writing "describes other characteristics of the hand" e,g, 
"shaky", "thick",. There seems no advantage to giving such descriptive 
notes in an attribute. @mainLang is not a property of the hand. @resp 
could be inherited from att.editLike, if needed, but it seems odd to 
single out identification of the hand from other aspects of ms 
description. I think these attributes are there because <hand> is empty, 
so there was a need to pack a lot of extra info into it. If we replaced 
<hand> by <handNote>, then any such extra info could appear as content 
of the element.