[tei-council] reminder

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Gabriel BODARD wrote:
> Surely the height, width, and depth of an 
> inscribed monument, for example, are defined not in relation to the text 
> (which may be on any surface) but to gravity and the viewer, 
> respectively. 

I'd say that an unambigous description using width and depth
must specify the relationship between the view and the object
in terms of a compass point. All other things being equal, I'd
be assuming that the viewer is standing on the south side of the object;
with the (common) exception being when there is obviously
a "primary" face.

> (6) Probably outside the scope of "minor corrections", but I still amn't 
> convinced by the numeric @degree attribute on certainty and precision. 
> (It strikes me as an example of what a senior epigraphy coleague refers 
> to as "spurious exactitude"--what does a precision of 0.5 mean?) 

I've got a lot of sympathy with this; but I've also got a lot
of scepticism aboout word-based measures. I bet none
of you have read a famous article my father wrote in the 1970s
called "How likely is likely?" about the spurious exactitude in
archaeological reports.....

> wanting to upset those who habitually use numerals here, and even less 
> so to break backward-compatibility, how about we add the existing 
> attributes @cert (to certainty) and @precision (to precision), with 
> their current suggested values 'low', 'medium', and 'high'?

a very TEI solution :-}

why not just, in your own project, limit @degree to the values
0.25, 0.5 and 0.75 and gloss them to 'low', 'medium', and 'high'?


> (9bis) I suppose it would be a little too controversial to suggest 
> changing the expansion of 'lb' to "line begins" rather than line break?

I definitely agree that this is beyond the scope
of a quick email discussion about an error-correction
release...!



-- 
Sebastian Rahtz
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

Sólo le pido a Dios
que el futuro no me sea indiferente