[tei-council] hands=

[Lou Burnard]

This should have been submitted as a bug in Sourceforge. Since there are 
several possible quick fixes and it's not clear which to adopt, please 
could Council members to express a choice amongst the following:

a) remove the possibility of saying "many" from the description. If 
people can't say how many hands there are, they should either not supply 
this attribute at all, or use some coded value like 999 to indicate that 
there is more than one
b) redefine the datatype as data.word so that people can say 
hands="lots" or hands="plenty" or indeed hands="strawberryJam"
c) invent a new datatype using a fiendishly ingenious pattern which 
matches either a string of digits or the string "many" but nothing else. 
Then we'll probably find other cases where we want to use it.


I have a preference but I won't state it yet (hint: it's not (b))



Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Matthew James Driscoll wrote:
>> According to the guidelines, the value of @hands on <handDesc> should 
>> be "A whole number, or the string "many"", but its data type is 
>> data.count and the string "many" produces an error message.
> definitely an error in the spec which we should correct one way or 
> another.
>>  It is, however, absolutely necessary to be to be able to say that 
>> the number of hands is a unspecified but greater than 3-4-5, i.e. 
>> "many". What to do?
>>   
> I fear I must defer to m'learned colleague with the gammy knee. I don't
> see an obvious way out.
>