[tei-council] Badging

[Daniel Paul O'Donnell]

Hi all,

An idea that has been kicking around forever as been to provide some way
of labelling a site as being associated with the TEI in some way.
Recently a couple of quite prominent sites that use TEI have been in the
news, received hundreds of thousands of hits, and not advertised their
association with the TEI anywhere except in their "about" fine print.

The most common idea is that we write up a code snippet that puts
"Powered by TEI" with a logo and a link (a la W3C conformance labels)
to... well something: the TEI-C site, or perhaps the conformance level
section of 23. I've tried out some ideas here:
http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Blog/sample-badges

Some of this is obviously more a branding than a technical matter, but
there are technical issues involved, so I thought I'd pass this on to
council and see what people think. The main technical issues involve
whether it is practicable or desirable to have people indicate versions
of TEI (P4 vs. P5 vs. a general TEI badge), and/or then within P5 at
least whether conformance type is something that is worth indicating.
Final questions, I suppose, are what the badges should point at and
whether their should be constraints on the nature of the site one
attaches such a badge to, e.g. 

Does the badge refer to the whole site or only a portion of it? If I
have TEI-encoded data in my project's back end, but the public page has
data in a mix of different sources and formats, does the badge apply?

Should the badge be used with sites where TEI is powering all or some of
the backend, but which does not present users with easy access to the
XML files? I.e. could it appear on a completely html website which
produces all of most of its content from TEI, or must the site provide
direct access to the TEI xml in order to have the badge?

Obviously any specifications we make would be on the honour system. I
think my preference is that we allow various options for people who want
to show off various aspects of their work: ranging from simple "I use
TEI" through "I use a TEI Extension," though I'm not sure what this last
kind of badge should point to.

Finally I'm not a graphic designer obviously. All I did was take the
original TEI logo and then put it on a background and colour scheme
derived from our current site. If we like the idea, we can get somebody
with more graphic skills than I to line 

What do people think?