[tei-council] Proposal <idno> coverage -SF 2493417

[David Sewell]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Laurent Romary wrote:

> You should not have some prejudice as to what scenario a user has in
> mind. We need to provide both ways.  When a bibliographical reference
> comes in the header of a scientific paper or as an export from a
> publication archive, you don't want to reconstruct the information by
> following links here and there. You need self-contained <biblStruct>'s

I would agree with Laurent here. If it is the case that standard author
identifiers are becoming part of the scholarly bibliographic world,
allowing <idno> as a child of <author> makes sense, particularly for
newer users of TEI encoding for whom the use of @xml:id / @corresp 
referencing schemes will be somewhat confusing. (And by "confusing" I 
don't mean the idea of pointers, rather the appropriate or legal places 
where referenced elements may appear in a TEI document.)

The proposal would be somewhat analogous to the use of <uri> in the 
DocBook content model for <author>:

http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/author.html

which can be used to provide an identifier:

   <uri type="nldai">info:eu-repo/dai/nl/12456454</uri>

(and as an aside, if I were a beginner trying to decide whether to use 
TEI or DocBook for encoding an original article, I would find the 
DocBook <author> element reference much more comforting than

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-author.html

with over 100 legal child elements, most of which have no apparently 
connection to the concept of an "author".)

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/