[tei-council] @key to be deprecated?

[Laurent Romary]

Just to answer David's point here, who did not attend Chicago's meeting, we do have a mechanism which is getting more and more ripe as we discuss this issue of deprecation. No worry here.

Le 20 sept. 2011 à 17:19, David Sewell a écrit :

> Should the issue of deprecating @key be submitted for discussion to 
> TEI-L before any final decision is made? So far as I can see, this has 
> been mentioned only once on TEI-L in posts by Gabby and James, see 
> http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1102&L=TEI-L&P=R297
> 
> David
> 
> On Tue, 20 Sep 2011, Martin Holmes wrote:
> 
>> OK, I'm becoming convinced on this. It looks like we need a ticket in
>> SF, along the lines of:
>> 
>> 1. @key will be deprecated. (Still not exactly clear on that process.)
>> 
>> 2. @ref will be added wherever @key is currently allowed, but @ref is not.
>> 
>> 3. All examples showing @key will be changed to show @ref, and magic
>> tokens without colons will be replaced with magic tokens that have colons.
>> 
>> 4. The documentation for @ref will be expanded to include an explanation
>> and examples of URIs which are not URLs (by which I presume we mean:
>> URIs which do not resolve to anything that can be located on the network).
>> 
>> Have I missed anything? Does this replace or subsume any existing tickets?
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Martin
>> 
>> On 11-09-19 08:49 AM, James Cummings wrote:
>>> On 19/09/11 16:12, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>>> Hi James,
>>> 
>>> Hi Martin,
>>> 
>>>>> 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.
>>>> 
>>>> Isn't foo:blort:1234 just magic too? If I've understood the proposal
>>>> correctly, foo: and blort: don't resolve to anything meaningful; isn't
>>>> foo:blort:1234 just a magic key that happens to have colons in it?
>>> 
>>> Yes, that is what I meant be 'just as much magic'. They are both
>>> magic. However, the URN-style magic key is a faceted one. (I know
>>> you could just make your @key value do this as well.)
>>> 
>>>> Backward-compatibility is the obvious one.
>>> 
>>> Yes, agreed.
>>> 
>>>> In that case, we're going to have an escalating tension between the
>>>> Birnbaum doctrine and the need to clean up problems in P5 (like this
>>>> one, perhaps, if you see it as a problem).
>>> 
>>> Perhaps, but the Birnbaum Doctrine doesn't say that we're not
>>> allow to break backwards compatibility, just that we should have
>>> a deprecation structure to do so.
>>> 
>>>> You actually caught me doing that (inadvertently) in an early version of
>>>> the Image Markup Tool, IIRC.
>>> 
>>> Oh yes, I remember that, naughty Martin. :-P (He says quickly
>>> hiding any of his code where he certainly sins in greater orders
>>> of magnitude.)
>>> 
>>>> 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.
>>> 
>>> Surely since you *can* do this ref="foo" then people will just do
>>> that while they are still working out their repository structure
>>> or system of magic keys?
>>> 
>>>> And if you get rid of
>>>> @key, people are just going to use @n for the same job, I bet.
>>> 
>>> What people abuse @n for something that is not a potentially
>>> non-unique number or other label, but instead some magic token to
>>> identify specific classes of elements?  Never... no one would
>>> ever do that!  I mean that would be like using @rend to refer to
>>> _output_ rendition not source rendition. *grin*  Erm, yeah, ok, I
>>> see your point. People would certainly do that, yes.
>>> 
>>> I still think using a URN-like URI on @ref is better because it
>>> forces you to consider _some_ form of classification or
>>> documentation principle. But yours are all good arguments for
>>> maintaining @key.
>>> 
>>> -James
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
> ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
> PO Box 400314, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4314 USA
> Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
> Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/
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Laurent Romary
INRIA & HUB-IDSL
laurent.romary at inria.fr