[tei-council] num

[James Cummings]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Lou Burnard wrote:
>> This was indeed one of the options I proposed in my email. But I 
>> wondered whether expanding the meaning (or reducing the constraints) 
>> associated with "data.numeric" might not be considered to be flouting 
>> the Birnbaum doctrine...
> not at all. call it data.extendednumeric if you like. Birnbaum does
> not disallow expansion

And just to remind people, since this is occasionally trotted out as an 
excuse, that said doctrine does *not* prohibit breaking backwards 
compatibility.  In fact it says: "Council should instead feel authorized 
to break backward compatibility when Council concludes that the 
advantages of doing so outweigh the disadvantages."  So it is really 
just a question of whether we think doing so outweighs the disadvantages 
of not doing so.

http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Council/Working/tcw09.xml

On the question of data.numeric, I see little problem in extending it 
(or adding an additional datatype as suggested above).

-James
-- 
Dr James Cummings, Research Technologies Service, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk