[tei-council] Styling of TEI <ident> in HTML Guidelines

[Syd Bauman]

> ... the point is that <name> is more general in its applicaion than
> <ident>. All <ident>s are <name>s, but not all <name>s are
> <ident>s. An <ident> is the name which is used specifically and
> solely to identify the entity concerned.

Interesting. While I agree that <name> is more general in its
application, I'm not sure all <ident>s are <name>s. E.g., on my local
filesystem I think of
   tei_all.rnc
as the name of an important file (and would encode that string with
<name>). But that's just a name, which does not uniquely identify
that file even within the confines of my system, as there are 2 or 3
other files on the system with the same name. Without getting into
the nuances of a Unix filesystem, inode numbers, hard vs. symbolic
links, etc., I think it is reasonable to think of
   /usr/share/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rnc
as the identifier for the version that was installed via the Debian
package. While I might encode that string as an <ident>, the
important part for this discussion is that I would not encode it as a
<name>.


> I don't know how you could "more uniquely" pick out the
> att.datable.w3c class than by supplying its identifier -- the
> string used as the value for its @ident attribute, no less.

Indeed if there is only one level of reference to an entity, it is
sort of angels on the head of a pin as to whether you encode that
one kind of reference as an <rs>, a <name>, or an <ident>. But one
way one would more uniquely identify "att.datable.w3c" is to identify
the version for my customization, which includes its prefix. And I
think that the fact that we think of "att.datable.w3c" as a class
name is an argument that we should have called the relevant attribute
name= instead of ident=.