[tei-council] @calendar: note in the wrong place

[Syd Bauman]

> Looking at this again, I am wondering why we have a @dur attribute at 
> all, if durational information can be carried by any of the @when-*  
> attributes.

Duration information can be carried on the when-iso= attribute, but
not the when= attribute, as the compound construction is a feature of
ISO 8601 that is not in the W3C profile.

IIRC, the logic for keeping dur-iso= was just to keep the attributes
in the W3C and the ISO set parallel for consistency.


> It surely can't be right to supply more than one way of doing
> things in this instance.

Perhaps not, although it certainly isn't the only kind of construct
that TEI provides multiple ways to encode. (Witness that we have 3
different specific mechanisms to encode the information that an
apparent error and its correction are exclusive.) The problem here is
that it becomes a little complex. Using when-iso= you can express
what adding dur-iso= can express (e.g., 2008-07-21/P2D), and what
from-iso= (or from=) and to-iso= (or to=) express combined (e.g.,
2008-07-21/23), but not individually. Do we want to say that
from-iso= (or from=) and to-iso= (or to=) cannot be used on the same
element that has a when-iso=? Or be in the business of saying "don't
use the combined ISO forms if you can split it out into 2 attrs"?


Hope this is clear -- I'm off teaching a TEI seminar and thus very
pressed for time.