[tei-council] Galway agenda

[Laurent Romary]

I would say we had that already: the issue of rewamping the  
stylesheet is strongly related to presenting the best possible  
documentation to our user (BTW, who is taking the lead on this issue:  
James? Seb?)

Le 28 mars 08 à 02:54, David Sewell a écrit :

> 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
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