[tei-council] vote on NH

[Lou Burnard]

Syd Bauman wrote:
> I don't know if my vote counts or not, but I am definitely and
> strongly in favor of A. I think it is important that NH be included
> in P5 1.0. As I've said before, you can't have Guidelines for
> encoding extant texts with XML that don't address overlap. 
>   
I don't think anyone disputes that we should have a chapter of the 
Guidelines which addresses this issue. The question before the house is 
whether or not the draft in its present form does so adequately and 
appropriately.

> Whether the chapter gets its re-arrangement before or after 1.0, what
> we really should be doing for 1.1, IMHO, is to
>
> * have NH generate a module that includes at a minimum
>   next=, prev=, and part=
>
> * address what bits belong in SA, and what belongs in NH
>
> * commit to supporting one form (or at most two forms) of segment
>   boundary delimiters in at least a limited fashion -- this may well
>   require work in TD to match
>
> * include a section discussing that the use of milestones (<pb>,
>   <cb>, <lb>, <milestone>) as discussed in CO is a method of handling
>   a particular kind of overlap
>   

All good suggestions, and worthy of serious work in 1.1 . But not very 
helpful, I suggest, as a way of deciding on the best course of action 
right now. The question (and it is a genuine question -- I still haven't 
read the draft so I haven't made my mind up) is really whether or not 
the current draft  actually offers the TEI text encoder clear and useful 
guidance on what to do when dealing with non-hierarchic structures. In 
P3, this chapter did make a set of concrete proposals, but they used a 
solution no longer available to us (because it was based on a seldom 
implemented feature of a standard we no longer use). When, back in 
August 2005, I asked Andreas to advise on this chapter, I was hoping 
that the state of play in markup theory had advanced to the point that 
some better alternative might have come along. On both Sebastian's and 
Dan's reading, either this is not the case, or if it is the chapter 
doesn't present it.

There is also the rather disturbing fact that we really have less than a 
month to go to finalise this *and* all the other chapters -- that is, to 
remove as many as possible of its typos, infelicitous expressions, 
duplications of matters discussed elsewhere etc, check it for 
consistency with the rest of the Guidelines, etc.  Every other chapter 
has been read several times by now, but this particular one has only 
just arrived.

May I also remind Council that we have a precedent for removing highly 
desirable material that hasn't arrived on time in the shape of the 
chapter on terminology -- also now held over till 1.1 Some people in the 
TEI community think that terminological data is *at least* as important 
as handling non hierarchic data. And the same could be said of the 
chapter on phys bib.  Let's be clear and consistent in our handling of 
this kind of problem!