[tei-council] a proposal for a change to ODD (copy of ticket I just put in SF)

[James Cummings]

Lou Burnard wrote:
> A standalone collection of examples is a nice idea : you could pull in 
> the individual ones you want in your ODD doc by using xInclude.

I believe *cough* someone *cough* suggested this fervently before our 
meeting in Lyon.  I then restated this in a later email and refer my 
learned colleague to my email to the council list of 2009-04-30.  In it 
I reiterated the idea that having a standalone collection of examples, 
which the Guidelines would then XInclude (or similarly transclude). 
This would allow (amongst many other things) a coordinated method of 
using the same example in multiple places in the Guidelines and ODD 
documentation.  I believe when I stated my reasons for thinking this was 
a good idea, it was indeed my honourable colleagues in Oxford who 
disagreed most vehemently with this suggestion. I am of course heartened 
to see your suggestion and assume that you have now seen the light.

I believe that the current problem could be solved with more rigorous 
ODD processing.  The multi-pass solution I would recommend is testing 
any example in the generated documentation against a schema generated 
from the ODD (but allowing any element as a starting element), much as 
we do in validating ex:egXML. The step that I'm not sure of in how to do 
it is how to capture and feed that information back into the 
transformation to then not include examples which do not validate. This 
would result in the transformation for documentation just not including 
any examples which did not validate against the current schema.  That's 
just a suggestion mind you, I'm certainly not offering to attempt to 
implement it.

-James