[tei-council] TEI for publishing: archival or interchange format? (was Re: What's next on the TEI publishing thread)

[O'Donnell, Dan]

I like that Kevin. I think the weaselling is pretty good and not 
noticeable. I do wonder if we downplay (or at least don't emphasise 
heavily enough) the real benefit that users of other formats might gain 
from working with us.

I'd say that things that would immediately strike me if I was reading 
this as an outsider already committed to another format are: do they 
want me to start encoding everything in TEI? And what do I gain 
concretely in my workflow by dealing with these people.

I suspect the answer is to make developing some transformation tools to 
and from major alternative XMLs a key deliverable of the larger effort 
(i.e. something we could participate in making?), and emphasing a little 
more strongly that an ability to convert in and out of some standard 
publishing customisation would allow content publishers an opportunity 
to really take advantage of community-developed initiatives and 
publication opportunities.

I realise you make this last point to a certain extent. But I wonder if 
it couldn't be hit harder.

But really well done.

-dan

On 10-09-01 12:51 PM, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
> On 8/31/2010 4:48 PM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>    
>> On 31 Aug 2010, at 21:30, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> Since I wrote most of the prose of the "call to action" in Google Docs,
>>> let me try to clarify what I meant.  Sebastian thought that the call to
>>> action is proposing TEI as an output format for sharing with users,
>>>        
>> not quite. I meant was it the format from which the readonly formats like
>> HTML and ePub are derived. I was distinguishing between the genuine
>> archive format (with all the markup, metadata and goodness) and the interchange format
>> from which one can make the output formats. Maybe the distinction is false, however
>>
>> But I would never propose TEI as a format for users, sorry :-}
>>      
> Okay, I understand now.  I have not been making such a distinction,
> which is why I conflated "archive" and "pivot point" in my document.  I
> avoided using the term "interchange format" because I find it ambiguous:
> you use it as pivot point, whereas to me it sounds a bit like an output
> format.
>
> I have revised to leave more wiggle room:
>
> https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ARyxZGtPbrQ1ZHYzZHg3aF8xNmZyYjR3emY4
>
> Is this better?
>
> Kevin
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-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
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-confidential)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/