[tei-council] roadmap / project plan for Roma and ODD processing

[Dan O'Donnell]

I gotta say that, having tried Vesta in Debian (albeit 
unsuccessfully--it's somehow not writing the result files anywhere I can 
see), I'm firmly in Laurent's camp: I think this is both great per se 
and a major strategic development. I see the explanation for the 
importance of this development as being that supporting new use cases 
and following on the TEI's recent renewed commitment to support as well 
as guidelines development and maintenance is requiring us to go to XSLT2 
with the result that we now have two sets of stylesheets. And then the 
rest of what Sebastian says.

Working with Vesta, I also think that ?Sebastian's idea of seeing the 
technology as two distinct things from the users perpective (i.e. an ODD 
generator and a content processor) is the clearest way of going.

-dan

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Peter Boot wrote:
>
>   
>>> The development of the desktop Vesta processor in Java for ODD (and
>>> other TEI XML) files necessitated a fork in the
>>>       
>> Maybe you need to argue that Vesta is necessary and useful, otherwise it
>> is not clear what people stand to gain from all this.
>>     
>
> well, true. I am not 100% convinced myself
>
> but adhering to the later version of the Recommendation has
> to be _a priori_ desirable, I suppose.
>
>   
>>> underlying XSLT stylesheets. The Saxon XSLT processor used does not
>>> support the extension features using by the ODD processing. This
>>> meant that the stylesheets had to be rewritten to use XSLT 2.0;
>>>       
>> You don't explain why you had to use Saxon.
>>     
>
> I had to use a Java processor; SFAICT, Xalan does not
> support the extension features I used in XSLT 1.
>
>   
>>> for processing ODD is created, using the same Java library developed
>>> for Erewhon, and the new Roma
>>>       
>> What is Erewhon?
>>     
>
> oh, sorry, I meant Vesta
>
>   
>> Should we also ask what type of functionality people are missing in
>> Roma, or what people hate or like about Roma?
>>     
>
> I am slightly reluctant to open a can of worms there and raise
> expectations; but it's a fair point. My default plan was
> to get back to the state of the current Roma, and then open
> it for changes. but revisiting functionaliy on day 1 also
> a good way to proceed.
>   


-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Founding Director, Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)
Chair, Electronic Editions Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America

Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/