[tei-council] Rationale for tagsDecl/namespace requirement?

[John A. Walsh]

Good catch, David.  I agree heartily with what you suggest below.

John
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| John A. Walsh
| Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science
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On Feb 1, 2008, at 12:10 PM, David Sewell wrote:

> Sorry not to have noted this before, but I'd like to raise a question
> about something in chapter 2 of the Guidelines (the TEI Header), in
> section 2.3.4, "The Tagging Declaration":
>
>    A TEI conformant document is not required to contain a tagsDecl
>    element, but if one is present, it must contain tagUsage elements
>    for each distinct element marked in the associated text...
>
> Now, a *valid* tagsDecl doesn't need to contain any tagUsage elements,
> as the content model of <tagsDecl> is
>
>  element tagsDecl { att.global.attributes, ( rendition*,  
> namespace* ) }
>
> (in P5, <tagUsage> elements are now children of <namespace>).
>
> But I submit that the following ought to be considered both valid and
> TEI conformant:
>
>   . . . [in teiHeader] . . .
>   <tagsDecl>
>      <rendition xml:id="bigbold" scheme="css">font-family: "Comic  
> Sans MS";
>         font-weight: bold; font-size: larger;</rendition>
>   </tagsDecl>
>   . . . [later, somewhere inside TEI/text] . . .
>   <p>It was a <emph rendition="#bigbold">very</emph> fine day.</p>
>
> Imagine a text, say a contemporary short story, where the author  
> uses a
> particular quirky typography on a regular basis, like the one  
> described
> by 'bigbold' above. In tagging this text, I want to be able to use
> the new P5 global @rendition to point to my formal CSS description of
> the typographic practice. But I don't see why I'm then obligated to
> figure out all the elements I'm using in the tagging and construct
> a <namespace> element with a <tagUsage> for each one, when all I want
> is a rigorous and consistent way of describing a particular rendition.
>
> I'd propose that the relevant Guidelines language on tagsDecl/ 
> namespace
> change "must" to "may" where applicable so that a practice like the
> above is not deprecated.
>
> David
>
> -- 
> David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
> ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
> PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
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