[tei-council] @key to be deprecated?

[Lou Burnard]

On 19/09/11 16:12, Martin Holmes wrote:

> You actually caught me doing that (inadvertently) in an early version of
> the Image Markup Tool, IIRC. And I agree that's completely wrong when
> using @ref; but I would argue that's why @key is helpful. When you're
> still working out the structure of your repository and the relative
> locations of files and subcollections, not having to be precise about
> the path to a particular @xml:id is very handy. And if you get rid of
> @key, people are just going to use @n for the same job, I bet.

For once I am delighted to say I 100% agree with Martin. We need to keep 
both : there will always be situation in which magic tokens are the best 
solution -- and that's what @key is for. When the token stops being 
magic (because the infrastructure itself is magic!) then we can 
recommend using @ref instead.

I also have a lot of sympathy for the view that says we should strongly 
deprecate the use of both attributes at once. In fact I thought we'd 
already agreed to implement that haven't we?