[tei-council] @key to be deprecated?

[James Cummings]

On 19/09/11 13:47, Martin Holmes wrote:
> I would argue strongly against dropping @key. Would anyone argue in favour?
>
> I think if we do discuss it, it should be from the point of view of
> settling on a more detailed set of recommendations on how to use it
> (along the lines of the methods proposed by Sebastian and Kevin).

I'll play devil's advocate on this. I think using URIs (in the 
form of URNs), even just locally constructed ones like 
foo:blort:1234 is a much better system than just bare keys which 
are just as much magic. The only reasons I can think of for using 
data.key for this kind of thing is ease of input. (Which then I 
would post-process to a more specific URN or a URL depending on 
use-case). What are some good reasons maintaining @key?

However, there are some caveats to that... @key has been around 
for quite some time and I know is being used significantly in the 
wild. Either a long period of warning before deprecation is 
needed, or it would be something for P6. (Which, btw, I still 
argue we have committed in TCW09 to *not* moving to except in the 
emergence of new technologies (e.g. SGML to XML) or a major new 
architectural/infrastructural change.)

I would also agree with Martin that more detailed recommendations 
are needed. One of the most frequent errors I notice are people 
doing things like: ref="foo" where there is not a file 'foo' (or 
even foo.xml), but where 'foo' is an xml:id not in their current 
document but in a document relating to the kind of element it is 
on.  So <persName ref="foo">Mr Foo</persName> gets changed in 
their processing to be <persName 
ref="files/over/there/people.xml#foo">Mr Foo</persName> (or more 
likely the processing just understands that and creates the 
output using the information).  The more we can dissuade people 
from this, the better. And better/more documentation of it is 
probably the first step.

-James

>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> On 11-09-18 11:45 PM, Laurent Romary wrote:
>> Now that I read the ticket again, it looks like a strong pre-P6 item to be put on the November meeting agenda: "magic token" or shall we drop @key?
>>
>>
>> Le 16 sept. 2011 à 15:30, Kevin Hawkins a écrit :
>>
>>> 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)
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> tei-council mailing list
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>>>>>
>>>>> PLEASE NOTE: postings to this list are publicly archived
>>>>
>>>> Laurent Romary
>>>> INRIA&    HUB-IDSL
>>>> laurent.romary at inria.fr
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>
>> Laurent Romary
>> INRIA&   HUB-IDSL
>> laurent.romary at inria.fr
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Dr James Cummings, InfoDev,
Computing Services, University of Oxford