[tei-council] Chapter 1

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Brett Zamir wrote:
> The customization sections refer to various possibilities for 
> customization, and even in Chapters 22 and 23, they don't seem to 
> discourage anything strongly except for using the same names as in the 
> TEI and giving them a different semantic meaning.
which is, indeed, more or less what was intended. The TEI  has always stood
in the middle ground between "make up tags as needed for your project" and
"these are my tags thou shalt have these and no other".  There is very 
strong
feeling that extending the TEI for a particular area will always be needed.
>   feel that the documentation is not emphatic enough--or at least to 
> always make clear that there are serious long-term pitfalls for 
> customizing in such a way as to break conformance. 
Those pages were argued about at considerable length, and are inevitably
a compromise. I would claim they are much more emphatic than the previous
edition, at least. Maybe they can be strengthened further, but we don't
want to lose the people in log cabins in Montana who think 100% conformance
is a meaningless aim.

>
> Also, on the opposite end, I think it might also be worth advising 
> people of why they shouldn't include all of the modules in the first 
> place. 
agreed. I thought we did make that point fairly clearly, but perhaps not.
I think most of us bang on about this a lot when we teach TEI.


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