[tei-council] on <editorialDecl>

[John A. Walsh]

Hi all,

I agree we should allow our semantically rich editorialDecl children  
to co-exist with regular prose, i.e., <p> tags.

John
--
| John A. Walsh
| Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science
| Indiana University, 1320 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405
| www: <http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/jawalsh/>
| Voice:812-856-0707 Fax:812-856-2062 <mailto:jawalsh at indiana.edu>



On Jan 30, 2008, at 11:15 AM, Syd Bauman wrote:

> [My apologies -- I've already been traveling for 2 weeks this year,
> and as a result am a bit behind on reading Council threads. If this
> has already been brought up, please just refer me to the recent
> conversation.]
>
>
> The P5 content model of <editorialDecl> is currently more restrictive
> than the P4 equivalent in one important way. I think P4 had it right,
> and that the current model demonstrates arrogance on our part.
> Furthermore, because reverting to the P4 world view would not break
> any existing TEI P5 documents, this may well be considered a
> corrigible error.
>
> P5 model:    ( model.pLike+ | model.editorialDeclPart+ )
>
> P4 model:    ( p+ | ( model.editorialDeclPart+, p* ) )
>
> That is, in P4 we said "you can just have chunks of prose, or, for
> those things that we can forecast what you might need to talk about,
> you can use these nifty special-purpose elements ... BTW, if you use
> both free-prose <p> elements and nifty special-purpose elements, you
> have to put the special-purpose ones first".
>
> This was great. Where the TEI had anticipated the kinds of editorial
> policies I want to express, I had some useful elements and attributes
> with controlled vocabularies to express them with. If there was more
> information to include, I tacked it on in a <p> element and went on
> my merry way.
>
> But now in P5 we say "you can just have chunks of prose, or, if we
> have forecast everything you might need to talk about, you can use
> these nifty special-purpose elements ... but, if you have even so
> much as 1 thing to say that we haven't predicted and created a nifty
> special-purpose element for, you have to use all prose".
>
> So now if I have even so much as 1 bit of editorial policy I wish to
> express that the TEI has not anticipated, I am forced to make a
> choice: use TEI's useful special-purpose elements and forgo other
> information or use all prose and forgo the controlled vocabulary,
> predictability, etc. of the special-purpose elements.
>
>
> Now, there is a reason for what (to me, and perhaps to you) seems
> like madness. This change was made in our strive to ensure that users
> could easily remove elements in their customizations and get valid
> DTDs out. If a user were to delete all elements in
> model.editorialDeclPart[1], the P4 content model would be reduced to
>  ( p+ | ( p* ) )
> which is valid in RELAX NG, but illegal in DTDs (and in XSD version
> 1). At the time it was argued that it is an inordinate strain upon a
> customizing user to have to go in and change the content model of
> <editorialDecl>, and that it was too difficult to have the DTD
> generation software do something else.
>
> But by now the DTD generation software *does* do something else. When
> asked to produce a DTD for
>  ( p+ | ( model.editorialDeclPart+, p* ) )
> Roma now produces
>  ( p+ | ( _DUMMY_model.editorialDeclPart+, p* ) )
> which is perfectly reasonable. (The DUMMY token is not declared, but
> it is valid in DTDs to refer to an undeclared element in a
> content model.)
>
>
> So I am hoping the time is ripe to give P5 users the expressive
> flexibility of P4, here.
>
>
> Notes
> -----
> [1] <correction>, <hyphenation>, <interpretation>, <normalization>,
>    <quotation>, <segmentation>, and <stdVals>.
>
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