[tei-council] invalid examples allowed in Guidelines?

[Sebastian Rahtz]

As you or may not know, every <egXML> in the Guidelines source
is checked at build time against the P5  schema. This is a good thing, of course.

While playing with validation of P5 again, I found (reminded myself) that 26
files have incomplete examples, along the lines of:

     <msDesc xml:id="DN17">
        <!-- ... -->
      </msDesc>

which is not valid because it misses the mandatory child <msIdentifier>.

Unfortunately, I cannot see a way to flag some instances <egXML>
as being deliberately incomplete.

There are four choices:

   a) fix the examples so they are minimally valid
   b) fix the build script so that this class of error is thrown away, 
        which has the disadvantage of  masking genuine errors;  
   c) leave the error messages in place and remember to ignore them each time
        (very confusing for the unwary)
   d) convert all these class of examples to CDATA in <eg>
        so they are not checked at all. This seems a bad precedent.

We were (until today) in a state of b).

Option a) is possible, but makes for some over-verbose examples
(eg
   <fileDesc>
         <titleStmt> <!-- ... --></titleStmt>
         <editionStmt> <!-- ... --></editionStmt>
         <extent> <!-- ... --></extent>
         <publicationStmt> <!-- ... --></publicationStmt>
         <seriesStmt> <!-- ... --></seriesStmt>
         <notesStmt> <!-- ... --></notesStmt>
         <sourceDesc><!-- ... --></sourceDesc>
    </fileDesc>
would need expanding a lot)

This was discussed a few years ago but since I have the patient open
on the operating table, I'd welcome some current options on the
proper way to proceed.
--
Sebastian Rahtz      
Information and Support Group 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