[tei-council] @key to be deprecated?

Tue Sep 20 12:30:00 EDT 2011

I follow Martin here (simpler system..;). Without any prejudice on the final outcome, I would urge him to file a ticket with the various elements he has mentioned in his last posts.
Cheers,
Laurent

Le 20 sept. 2011 à 17:31, Martin Holmes a écrit :

> I think we're talking about trying to arrive at a much simpler system in 
> the very long run (hence deprecation); once again, here, we have 
> multiple ways of doing the same thing, some of which we're proposing to 
> recommend (URIs in @ref) and the other of which we're going to continue 
> to allow (magic tokens in @key). One of the most common complaints we 
> hear both from experts and from new users is that TEI has too many ways 
> of doing the same thing, so where one method is clearly superior to the 
> other, we should surely plan to move towards it.
> 
> Cheers,
> Martin
> 
> On 11-09-20 08:24 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
>> I'm not sure that I agree with Martin's analysis.
>> 
>> a) Are there any places where @key is permitted but not @ref? if there
>> are, then I agree that @ref should be added as an alternative
>> 
>> b) Changing *all* examples using @key to examples using @ref seems like
>> an over reaction to me though I agree that we need to increase the
>> number of examples using @ref=my:uri:notation
>> 
>> I had interpreted the sense of the preceding discussion to be that we
>> understood why people might want to supply a privately magic token as
>> the value for @key but that they needed to be reminded that an
>> alternative slightly less magical option would be to use @ref with the
>> proposed URI syntax.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 20/09/11 16:19, David Sewell wrote:
>>> 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
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> Martin Holmes
> University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
> (mholmes at uvic.ca)
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Laurent Romary
INRIA & HUB-IDSL
laurent.romary at inria.fr