[tei-council] P5 source, modifying class atts at the base level.

[Sebastian Rahtz]

On 30 Sep 2011, at 10:42, Lou Burnard wrote:

> But fwiw, I think supplying valLists in the P5 source is, in general, a 
> bad idea. That is something which projects should be encouraged to do 
> for themselves in their own ODDs. The Guidelines should (in general) 
> specify a datatype, and may (sometimes) provide a list of suggested 
> values in order to indicate the intended semantics of the attribute, but 
> the TEI per se is not in the business of enumerating all possible 
> attribute value lists.

I can see why you say this, but its quite a change in direction? I see c. 129 
<valList>s in the sources, 63 of them closed. You seriously suggest we
abandon these?

I personally think we should expand, not reduce, the number of closed
valLists, because I am less keen on the  Classic TEI Thousand Flowers Blooming
vagueness :-}

> 
> We could certainly consider adding some other syntactic mechanism to 
> achieve the same goal, as you suggest, by using mode="change". But I 
> think that somewhat confuses the issue. Either this attribute is a 
> member of the class or it isn't. If it is, then changing it anywhere 
> affects all instances equally: that's what being a member of a class 
> means. Or it isn't, in which case we cannot be "changing" it here, but 
> rather adding a different one which happens to have the same name 
> (that's the current way of doing it).
> 
> If we're really dissatisfied with the status quo, I'd say a different 
> value for @mode ("override"?) would be much clearer. But I'm still 
> unconvinced.

I see what you mean about the semantics of mode="change", but surely
this is what we do in our local ODD all the time? we give div/@type a closed
<valList>, but we're not stopping it being a member of att.typed, are we?
--
Stormageddon Rahtz      
Head of Information and Support Group
Oxford University Computing Services
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