[tei-council] Tite and conformance (long)

[Daniel Paul O'Donnell]

Lou Burnard wrote:
> James Cummings wrote:
>   
>> Lou Burnard wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Indeed it was. I had in mind the broken-ness of not using namespace 
>>> prefixes to distinguish its non-TEI bits from the rest though.
>>>       
>> Where has this idea originated? 
>>     
>
> I believe this idea originates with the chair of the TEI Board from whom 
> I quote:
>
> "In Tite, no distinct namespace is supplied for these elements (though 
> it  is easily and automatically determined). This is because it wants to
> avoid requiring keying the additional namespace identifiers. But by not
> supplying a distinct namespace, Tite is engaging in a practice that is
> "strongly deprecated" by the Guidelines (23.3.4
> http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/USE.html#CFNS)."
>
> Fortunately, (or actually not fortunately but as a result of some hard 
> work by Sebastian inter alia) this is almost entirely wrong. Apologies 
> if I misrepresent the chair's understanding in this regard.
>   
Guilty as charged. Forgetting to RTFM is something that makes me unique, 
I suspect, since there is no acronym for it.

Anyway, I was responding to the question of the use of unprefixed 
convenience elements that started this whole thread. I guess the short 
answer is that Tite does things right, and anybody who wants to use the 
convenience elements without prefixes is a scoundrel.

Given that scoundrels exist, however, I am now interested in the 
question of what happens to internationalisations (which are 
customisations and should have their own namespaces) when they keep a 
canonical element name? Do they too need to use different name spaces? 
(e.g. for a hypothetical Dutch example that uses alinea for p but keeps div)

<tei xmlns="http://tei-c.org/ns/1.0/nl">
<!-- snip -->
<tei:div>
  <alinea>Een of een andere stukie tekst</alinea>
</tei:div>
<!-- snip -->
</tei>

Or do they copy them all over to their own namespace?

<tei xmlns="http://tei-c.org/ns/1.0/nl">
<!-- snip -->
<div>
  <alinea>Een of een andere stukie tekst</alinea>
</div>
<!-- snip -->
</tei>

If the later, then the answer to David's original question might be that 
the problem of not wanting to explicitly identify namespaces for the 
custom elements is eliminated if all of Tite was in the Tite ns.

-dan
  <

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

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)

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