[tei-council] genetic proposals: document/whatever

[Lou Burnard]

On 11/06/11 04:12, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
>
>
> One question here ...
>
> Perhaps I've forgotten or missed this part of the discussion in Chicago,
> but I don't see why it follows that we need a new name.  Instead,
> couldn't we simply expand the semantics of the proposed<document>
> element so that<document type="facsimile">  would be the new preferred
> way of doing<facsimile>?  Then<facsimile>  could either be deprecated
> for future use or left in the Guidelines as syntactic sugar.
>

I think the only problem with <document> was that everyone pulls a face 
when it's proposed. (Probably the same thing would have happened when 
the tag <text> was first proposed) ... seeing the current <facsimile> as 
a specialised case of the proposed <whatever> is certainly a very 
attractive idea, whatever it's called.

Comparing the two, however, don't forget that the proposed <whatever> 
requires the definition of <surface>s . This would (for me) be an 
improvement on the case of <facsimile> which currently only requires 
them in the case where two images relate to the same surface but might 
by some be regarded as an unnecessary tagging burden. For me it makes 
very good sense to say that inside a <whatever> you present an 
organisation of <surface>s, for each of which you might just have one or 
more images, or you might have zones, so I really like this proposal.

Many thanks for launching the discussion Kevin! I was a bit worried that 
the length of my summary posting had frightened everyone into silence...