[tei-council] Suggestions

[James Cummings]

Lou Burnard wrote:
>> * Shouldn't we have a searchable council mailing list? If needed, I
>> believe I can set up a listserv list at surfnet.nl
>>   
> I thought it was searchable? It's certainly archived. However, a 
> listserv hosted at surfnet.nl might well be a bit  more reliable than 
> the council list has been for the last year or so!

The Council lists are archived in Virginia at:
   http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/
I don't believe the pipermail installation there is currently setup to allow 
searching.  However, I do know that pipermail listservs can be searched (because 
I've found others elsewhere which can.)  This may be a mailing-list by 
mailing-list setting, or an overall system setting, I don't know.  While Peter's 
offer is generous, since we have been working on moving the online aspects of 
the TEI to virginia alongside the new website (and Roma, and Wiki migrations), 
it would seem strange to suddenly move the council archives somewhere else just 
as we'd finally got things going at virginia after lots of hard work.  I'd 
humbly submit that the better course of action might be to have the council 
decide that they need searching of their mailing lists (which have only been 
publicly accessible for a couple years now) and if they are unable/unwilling to 
do it only then consider moving them somewhere else.  (And in that case I'd 
suggest Brown (if willing) since TEI-L is there.)

If you do need to search the archives at the moment, then since the pages are 
all indexed by google on a fairly regular basis then just do a site search which 
includes the council archives URL as a site, e.g.:

"site:http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council Sanity Checker"

This of course has the problems and limitations of any google search results, 
but I use a quick bookmarklet to search them occasionally to refresh my memory.

> I discussed this with Peter Robinson a few months back, and I think I 
> persuaded him at that time that he didn't need all those extra 
> attributes. But maybe his ideas have moved on since then. Certainly, I 
> agree with you that it's an interesting idea worth pursuing, and we 
> should actively seek a proposal from him or others interested in the idea.

I also discussed this matter with Peter Robinson, and suggested that if Lou's 
idea (of using the existing TEI canonical referencing system, I believe, for 
some of the needed attributes) wasn't acceptable, that it might be more useful 
to have these attributes in an entirely separate namespace, so that they could 
be used equally in other markup languages. (i.e. this <docbook:para> is from a 
second edition of a work where this <tei:p> has the first edition, and other 
such complicated things.) Of course, that leads to all sorts of other problems.

-James
-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk