[tei-council] cRefPattern discussion in CO

Lou Burnard lou.burnard at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Mon Oct 22 15:59:29 EDT 2007


I'm still pondering over this, alas.

As currently defined, this seems less than useful: it tells you how to 
translate a value specified explicitly on an element into an xpath to 
point at ... that element! But surely, if you're there already you don't 
need to be told how to get to it? It's a bit like having a way of 
translating house names ("Mon Repos") into addressable street addresses 
(12 Railway Cuttings, East 45th St, The World, Space) which sounds nice 
until you realise that (a) you have to get to 12 Railway Cuttings 
somehow before you find out that it is called "Mon Repos" (b) there's no 
way of  coping with the possibility that there might be more than one 
place called "Mon Repos"!

However, I think I can see a way in which it *would* be useful: if you 
turn it upside down or inside out, or otherwise reverse its polarity, so 
that it can be used to generate a nice house name out of an address 
(instead of the other way round), suddenly it has a really useful role 
to play. In this text, we always talk about  houses by means of their 
names not their addresses, but here is how  you turn an address into a 
name.  I am a server sitting on top of a bunch of interesting XML texts: 
if you come along and try to address those texts by canonical reference 
number, rather than by XPATH, now I can help you, iff I can translate 
the canonical refs you use into an xpath.

I quite like that!



 Syd Bauman wrote:
>> a) anyone object if I move all discussion of the somewhat obscure
>> cRefPattern element out of CO into somewhere more specialised
>> (probably SA, since that's where we talk about xpath most)
>>     
>
> I don't think SA is an appropriate location -- unless you want to
> stretch the meaning of "alignment" to include "aligning canonical
> references to their targets" or some such wordplay.
>
>  On quick scan, this looks like it belongs in HD, no?
>
>
>   
>> b) any suggestions as to what should be done to fix the last
>> example? if none is forthcoming I shall probably just remove the
>> whole section for now.
>>     
>
> Since a few examples above "work book.poem.line" is shown, I don't
> see that it's very helpful to show "work book:poem.line" here. I'd
> say delete it, and either bring the <refState> example into line with
> the 1st <cRefPattern> example, or vice-versa.
>
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