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

[James Cummings]

Lou Burnard wrote:
>> I think, from memory, that we disagreed with the practicality of
>> it for real-world work on the whole Guidelines. The theory is fine.

That was one of the objections. You two also argued that 
decontextualised examples don't always make sense (which really missed 
the point, that they wouldn't necessarily be decontextualised, just 
decoupled from the guidelines/specs so that their re-use was facillitated).

> Precisely. The present conversation is about a customisation of the TEI, 
> not the whole of the Guidelines.

Is not the TEI Guidelines in theory one big ODD file? If it makes sense 
for one, why not for the other?

> Then there's also the question of foreign language examples (cf recent 
> email from our man in Nancy)

I only think this *strengthens* the case for a repository of examples 
which are then referenced from the Guidelines/Specs.  Just as the 
English Guidelines use examples from many languages, so might 
translations of the Guidelines.  Moreover, they want them to stay up to 
date when the examples are changed because of changes in the TEI.

>> doable, similar to what I just suggested.  It's a big stick, though.
> a big stick to squash a fairly small insect, I'd say

I'd be tempted to say that an ODD should maybe check simply that all the 
elements in an example are present for the current schema, and if not 
add a comment to the example indicating it might be out of date because 
element <foo> is no longer included in the schema.  That seems like it 
would be much more straightforward to program, doesn't remove the 
example, but warns the user that it may be inaccurate.

-James