[tei-council] and then there's the TBOs question

[Lou's Laptop]

A number of projects cataloguing early print material and
incunables have reported that the current msdescription module meets
most of their requirements, albeit with some grimaces about the names of the
elements. It has been suggested that it would be desirable in the
medium term to try to generalise the "ms*" elements into
"text-bearing-object*". In the immediate short term however, a
surprisingly small number of minor modifications would enable all of
what is reported as needful by at least one major project aiming to
catalogue incunables:

1. the elements docAuthor, docDate, docImprint, and docTitle currently
permitted only within a titlePage, should be made available within
msItem and msContents.

2. a new typeDesc element, analagous to handDesc, and as an
alternative to it, is needed to contain descriptions of the
typographic features of a printed source, within the physDesc.


We could work this into the next release if there is general agreement 
that it's not a step in the wrong direction... In any case, I propose 
putting these two ideas into feature request form for discussion at the 
next opportunity.