[tei-council] invalid examples allowed in Guidelines?

[Lou Burnard]

On 11/01/11 10:23, James Cummings wrote:
> 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.

As my previous post suggests, I think I disagree with this. It isn't 
just a matter of presentation: it's a matter of the intention underlying 
the specific example -- what it is meant to illustrate. There are 
situations where we want to illustrate something about an element 
without being specific about its content because to do so would be 
confusing. We want to illustrate whereabout in a document  a Header can 
appear without repeating all the information about what a Header must 
contain. We want to demonstrate that a <div> can contain just <entry> 
elements and nothing else.

Of course there are also times when we want to present the overall gross 
structure of a document, and allow the reader to unpack at will 
particular bits of it to reveal the wonders below, but that's a 
different pedagogic situation and a different approach, not really well 
suited to a document which has to be usable in static printed form as 
well as on the web.