[tei-council] NH revised

[Daniel O'Donnell]

As I was saying to Syd yesterday, I think this merits thought--basically
the question of whether we can support something like HORSE within the
TEI explicitly--but it is also definitely a post 1.0 decision: far more
major, in my view than either the choice business or the app/rdg
business.

So for this edition, it seems to me that indicating that tags are
allowed to be empty, and might therefore be used somehow at the user's
risk to implement a HORSE scheme seems a useful compromise. other than
standoff, join, and multiple encodings, none of the options are really
adequately supported by the TEI at this moment, though anchor and HORSE
can kind of accomplish things in the current version.

-dan

On Sat, 2007-10-20 at 07:51 -0400, Syd Bauman wrote:
> > So, the semantics and expected content of an element can be changed
> > just by the attributes it bears?
> 
> Yes. As in many cases. E.g. fVal= of <f>:
> * <f>a</f>: feature is a
> * <f fVal="#b"/>: feature is what is found at #b
> * <f fVal="#b">a</f>: feature is unification of a and what's at #b
> * <f/>: an error
> 
> Seems analogous, although obviously not a 1:1 mapping:
> * <q>a</q>: quoted passage is a
> * <q sID='x'/>: quoted passage is here to eID=x
> * <q eID='x'/>: quoted passage is here (back) to sID=x
> * <q sID='x'>a</q>: an error
> * <q eID='x'>a</q>: an error
> 
> 
> > I find that a leetle hard to swallow, frankly.
> 
> I don't understand why. Remember, we're not changing the semantics of
> what the element *means* (a quote is still a quotation, an s is still
> a sentence), rather the semantics of what the tag means to a
> processor: I enclose the entire element vs I indicate the start or
> end boundary of the element. 
> 
> This is not at all unlike part=[IMF] or next= and prev=.
> 
> An <l> alone says "I am a metrical line". An <l> with part="I" says
> "I am part of a metrical line, go find the next <l> (which should
> have part="M" or part="F") to get the rest of the metrical line".
> 
> An <l> alone says "I am a metrical line". An <l> with next="#n" says
> "I am part of a metrical line, go find target 'n' (which should be an
> <l>) to get the rest of the metrical line".
> 
> An <l> alone says "I am a metrical line". An <l> with sID='e' says "I
> am the beginning of a metrical line, go find eID='e' (which should be
> an empty <l> with no attrs) to find the end of the metrical line".
> 
> Not so different, really.
> 
> 
> > There is just one tiny precedent though: the <shift> element marks
> > the start of something (a segment boundary in fact) when its @new
> > attribute is specified, and the end of something when it isn't. But
> > its content is always the same.
> 
> Yeah, but <shift> is even weirder: it has an application range that I
> imagine would be a pain to process properly -- "I am in force only
> for utterances of the same speaker, until another <shift> w/ same
> feature= but no new= or new='normal'" (did I get that right?)
> 
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-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Department Chair and Associate Professor of English
Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org/

Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox +1 403 329-2377
Fax +1 403 382-7191
Email: daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca
WWW: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/