[tei-council] invalid examples allowed in Guidelines?

James Cummings James.Cummings at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Tue Jan 11 05:23:31 EST 2011


On 11/01/11 09:44, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> James has an interesting counter proposal, that we should make all
> the examples entirely valid, but add a new attribute @noDisplay in the TEIX namespace.

Just to elaborate on this.  The idea is that when we are missing 
out elements in TEI examples we are doing so *only* for a reason 
of presentation. (Changes to ODD to allow other things, I would 
contend is a separate issue.)

It would, however, be better if the user could choose to see the 
missing bits or not in some cases, and the example was when fully 
shown a valid chunk of TEI.  So my suggesting is *slightly* 
different from what Sebastian suggests below.  Instead of putting 
the attribute  on the <fileDesc> I would have put it on the child 
elements since you may wish to hide some of them and not others. 
  Moreover I would not have this be a binary true/false but 
instead have something like: 'collapsed', 'expanded', 'hidden', 
etc.

So instead of:

> so
>    <egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples" xmlns:teix="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples">
>      <fileDesc teix:noDisplay='true'>
>        <titleStmt>
>          <title>The title</title>
>        </titleStmt>
>        <editionStmt>
>          <p/>
>        </editionStmt>
>        <publicationStmt>
>          <p/>
>        </publicationStmt>
>        <sourceDesc>
>          <p/>
>        </sourceDesc>
>      </fileDesc>
>   </egXML>


we might have:

<egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples" 
xmlns:teix="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples">
<fileDesc>
        <titleStmt teix:display="collapsed">
           <title>The title</title>
         </titleStmt>
         <editionStmt teix:display="invisible">
           <p/>
         </editionStmt>
         <publicationStmt teix:display="expanded">
           <p>Something here</p>
         </publicationStmt>
         <sourceDesc teix:display="hidden">
           <p/>
         </sourceDesc>
    </fileDesc>
</egXML>


which would be shown in a web view as something like:

<fileDesc>
        <!-- tei:titleStmt collapsed for display click to expand -->
         <publicationStmt>
           <p>Something here</p>
         </publicationStmt>
         <!-- tei:sourceDesc hidden for display -->
    </fileDesc>
</egXML>

i.e. the 'collapsed' titleStmt is able to be clicked to expand 
and appear, the publicationStmt is always visible, the 
editionStmt is not visible or commented upon, the sourceDesc is 
not visible but commented upon. In printed media collapsed and 
hidden would be handled identically.  Things should only be 
marked as 'invisible' if the example is entirely valid without 
them but for some reason we wanted to include it. (e.g. 
maintaining fidelity with an existing example, or using the same 
example multiple times with different bits invisible or hidden.)

> What do others think of this? I find it rather elegant, and has exactly the
> right effect.

I hope this expansion on it is equally elegant.  While you can 
talk me out of the need for 'invisible' probably, I would argue 
that it isn't a binary opposition of displayed and nonDisplayed 
that we need but notedAsAComment, collapsed and expanded.

-James
-- 
Dr James Cummings, Research Technologies Service
OUCS, University of Oxford


More information about the tei-council mailing list