[tei-council] Chapter 20 Non-hierarchical Structures

[Lou's Laptop]

Brett Zamir wrote:
> *
> 20.2 Boundary Marking with Empty Elements
> *
> For the example with '<lg 
> xmlns:hr="http://www.example.org/ns/nonTEI">', aren't <s>'s supposed 
> to be present end to end? It seems this approach couldn't work if 
> schemas ever started to enforce this requirement of <s>, no?
>
You're right. However, I am quite puzzled as to what the TEI namespaced 
<s> element is doing in this example anyway. I've changed it to a <seg>


> *20.3 Fragrmentation and Reconstitution of Virtual Elements
> *
> With the lines:
>      "This method is TEI Conformant and simple to use. Its 
> disadvantage is that it does not work well for cases of self-overlap, 
> or if there are nested occurrences of the same element type, as it can 
> become difficult to ascertain which initial, medial, or final partial 
> element should be combined with which others or in which order."
>
> and parts of the example, e.g.,:
>     <s part="F">"<s>Is that guy
>
> ...it seems that nested <s>'s are allowed, whereas the reference page 
> indicates they are not allowed:
>
> "May contain any combination of text and phrase-level elements; *may 
> not contain itself*. The <s> element may be used to mark orthographic 
> sentences, or any other segmentation of a text, provided that the 
> segmentation is end-to-end, complete, and *non-nesting*." at 
> http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/P5/Guidelines-web/en/html/ref-s.html
>

Again you are right and the example is wrong. I have changed <s> 
globally to <seg>


> *20.4 Stand-off Markup
> *
> Couldn't the namespace in "<p 
> xmlns:xi="http://www.example.org/ns/nonTEI">" be removed in favor of 
> simply escaping the "<" marks and adding the xi:include as CDATA? That 
> would seem to be much more clear for the sake of example (and avoid 
> the need for the footnote about it).
>

But then we couldn't validate the example.
> For the lines, "It has been noted that stand-off markup has several 
> advantages over embedded annotations. In particular, it is possible to 
> produce annotations of a text even when the source document is 
> read-only.", isn't the same possible with a <join> with @targets set 
> to the read-only (external) document?
>
Yes. <join> is an example of stand-off markup, so I don't quite 
understand youre point.

> For the line, "although all of the information of the multiple 
> hierarchies is included, the information may be difficult to access 
> using generic methods.", I presume by "difficult to access" it means 
> it is difficult for a human reader to follow? If this is not what it 
> means, I think that should still be added as an argument against such 
> markup. In any case, I think this sentence should be clarified/simplified.
>
This is by no means the only sentence in this chapter in need of 
simplification! but I think it's clear enough -- the more layers of 
annotation in a text, the more likely it is that generic simple off the 
shelf applications won't be able to cope. It's not (particularly) to do 
with human readability though that is obviously a factor as well.

> For the line, "Inasmuch as it uses elements not included in the TEI 
> namespace, stand-off markup involves an extension of the TEI.", if TEI 
> schemas were to be made expected to support the XInclude namespace and 
> elements (like you are supporting the XML namespace attributes), such 
> documents would not need to be an extension. I'm disputing the 
> "inasmuch" part of this sentence here since a schema can import more 
> than one namespace, but also indicating my preference that XInclude 
> support be built-in to TEI (I know, Sourceforge, right?) :)
>
Er, yes. But it would still be an extension in some sense to use 
xinclude, or anything else from another namespace, surely? (the xml 
namespace is a special case )

> *20.5 Non-XML-based Approaches*
>
> For the line, "Use of these methods with the TEI will certainly 
> involve extensions; in most cases te documents will also be 
> non-Conformant.", isn't an extension "non-conformant" by definition?
>
Not exactly: see the chapter on conformance