[tei-council] Galway agenda

[David Sewell]

Should we simply add "Roma" to the agenda under the Tools heading? Not 
to attempt to resolve all the issues that Syd mentions but to set some 
priorities.

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Syd Bauman wrote:

> I realize that Council may consider this an intrusion, since I am no
> longer on Council and have not been invited to attend the meeting in
> Galway. If so, please accept my apologies in advance. However, I am
> very concerned that one of the most important, if not the most
> important, tasks facing the TEI is not on the agenda.
>
>
> In P5 we have explicitly created a system which is not designed to be
> useful out-of-the-box, but rather is intended to be customized.
> Proper customization of P5 is an integral part of any TEI encoding
> project. We (I think appropriately) make a big deal out of the
> advantages of using ODD for this purpose, and even provide some tools
> to help.
>
> One of the advantages we (appropriately) tout is that from an ODD you
> get not only a schema, but also custom documentation. This custom
> documentation of their schema could be extremely useful to an
> encoding project. However, currently it is not very useful at all
> because
> a) it is not very well designed,
> b) its CSS stylesheet is such that it is all but completely
>   unreadable
> c) links to the Guidelines proper don't work, and
> d) internationalization output doesn't work correctly.
>
> Having custom on-line documentation (not necessarily printed) is,
> IMHO, absolutely crucial to the acceptance of TEI in many circles.
> Imagine how much easier it would be to introduce people to TEI if the
> reference documentation for TEI Lite were usable. The TEI put a lot of
> effort into making TEI Lite accurate and helpful (the vast majority of
> the work was done by Lou Burnard). But from section 20 on through the
> ever-so-important appendices, it's so poorly formatted as to be
> unusable.
>
> The TEI put a lot of effort into allowing users to choose which
> language would be used for formal documentation (i.e., <gloss> and
> <desc> inside <*Spec>) and for element and attribute names (the vast
> majority of the technical work and coordination was done by Sebastian
> Rahtz). But this effort doesn't help most users, because even when
> Roma does use the requested language (and I have not been able to
> figure out when it will spit out non-English snippets and when it
> won't), it seems to use all of them, and even if it only used the
> right one, the formatting would still make the documentation all but
> unusable.
>
> I don't know that it is reasonable for TEI to attack (a) in the near
> future. But it seems to me that (b), (c), and (d) are of the utmost
> importance and should be very very high priority tasks for Council (in
> that order, I would say, but that's debatable).
>
>
> P.S. Another item that should be on the agenda, although not as
>     important, is finding the resources to improve Roma so that it is
>     more usable for what customizers actually need to do (e.g.,
>     constrain type= values and document them), or to re-write Roma
>     from scratch, preferably as a desktop application.[1]
>
>
> Note
> ----
> [1] It has now been nearly 2 years since Amit Kumar took on this task,
>    and since he is no longer on Council and has pretty much dropped
>    out of sight (I have been to UIUC 3 times since, and have barely
>    seen him, and he has not responded to my e-mail queries about this
>    project), I think it would be worth examining this issue afresh.
>    If Council would like, I would not mind trying to check in w/ Amit
>    again via phone just so we know for sure where he stands.
>
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>

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
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Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
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