[tei-council] @key to be deprecated?

[Martin Holmes]

Thanks for finding this, Kevin. The idea of deprecating @key, and 
leaving us without an attribute with the datatype data.key (excepting 
@lemma), is a bit worrying to me. This is the issue I'm dealing with:

Imagine you have this kind of folder structure:

data /
      people /
      places /
             countries /
             rivers /
      documents /

where TEI documents exist at every level of the structure. Then let's 
say that inside "countries" you have britain.xml, with a bunch of 
<place> elements, of which one is <place xml:id="london">.

Now let's imagine you have documents all over the place which need to 
link to this xml:id. You could do this:

<ref target="../places/countries/britain.xml#london">

However, each document which contains a link may have a different 
relative path to get to the britain.xml file; and any of these documents 
may move around in the structure, as you reorganize your data, 
invalidating the links. data.pointer, as far as I understand it, should 
really be an accurate pointer to the resource, but in the context of a 
loosely-structured XML collection, that may not be possible as paths 
will change. However, within the context of (say) an eXist database, 
it's perfectly possible to find what you're searching for using a 
data.key which consists of the @xml:id of the target.

Therefore, if the proposal to deprecate @key is still alive, I'd like to 
address it and, if possible, kill it. I think @key is the best solution 
to this kind of loose linking.

Cheers,
Martin

On 11-09-16 06:30 AM, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
> I'm not sure what made Martin recall this discussion about deprecating
> @key, but this is exactly what I was brought up in another thread
> yesterday.  See:
>
> http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Council/Meetings/tcm45.xml
>
> for which the discussion about @key seems to reference this ticket:
>
> https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2919640&group_id=106328&atid=644065
>
> --Kevin
>
> On 9/16/2011 2:08 AM, Laurent Romary wrote:
>> HI Martin,
>> I don't remember such a thing, and @key is indeed needed in many cases where there is no reference description for a given entity.
>> Cheers,
>> Laurent
>>
>> Le 15 sept. 2011 à 23:34, Martin Holmes a écrit :
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I seem to remember some discussion about deprecating @key, or changing
>>> it to a URI, but I can't find any mention of it in the archives or on
>>> SF. Does anyone remember anything about this? I find I really need it
>>> for something, in a context where I can't use a URI, so I want to make
>>> sure it's going to continue to be available.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Martin
>>> --
>>> Martin Holmes
>>> University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
>>> (mholmes at uvic.ca)
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>>>
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>>
>> Laurent Romary
>> INRIA&   HUB-IDSL
>> laurent.romary at inria.fr
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)