[tei-council] Disambiguation of <ident> and <idno> (and also <gi>)

Martin Holmes mholmes at uvic.ca
Sat Nov 26 16:19:33 EST 2011


Good point from both JC and SY on "uniquely"; I'll scrap that from the 
proposed wording. We're getting a bit closer to a consensus. I take 
James's point also about putting some or all of this stuff into a 
<remarks> section, rather than the actual <desc>. Does everyone else 
agree with that?

Cheers,
Martin

On 11-11-26 01:08 PM, stuart yeates wrote:
> On 27/11/11 04:16, James Cummings wrote:
>> On 26/11/11 07:13, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>>>> ----------<ident>      should be used for tokens such as variable
>>>>> names, class names, type names, function names etc. in formal
>>>>> programming languages. (It should not be used for element and
>>>>> attribute names in XML, for which the special elements<gi>
>>>>> and<att>      are provided.)
>>>>>
>>>>> <idno>      should be used for labels which uniquely identify an
>>>>> object or concept in a formal cataloguing system such as a
>>>>> database or an RDF store, or in a distributed system such as the
>>>>> World Wide Web. ----------
>>
>> I don't mind these as definitions though they seem a bit discursive. I'd
>> move the parenthetical statement to a note/remarks section, along with
>> the examples 'such as...' there you could also distinguish between
>> idno/ident and cross reference.
>>
>>>> I suggest that<idno>     be given precedence, since I imagine it's
>>>> more widely used.
>>>
>>> I don't really understand what "precedence" means here. If I've
>>> failed to disambiguate the two tags, then I should try again, but I
>>> don't think we should ever be in the position of saying "these two
>>> tags are basically the same, but you should prefer this one because
>>> we have a feeling that more people use it than the other one".
>>
>> I think what Stuart means is that idno is the more general purpose
>> element in this case which _could_ be used for things that might be
>> considered idents, but that we have ident as an element for that. e.g.
>> that ident = idno/@type='ident'. I'm not sure that entirely fits with
>> your definitions though.
>
> Yes, that's what I meant, but James always seems to say it better.
>
> ----
>
> Reflection also suggests removing the word 'uniquely' to change
>
> <idno>   should be used for labels which uniquely identify an ...
>
> to
>
> <idno>   should be used for labels which identify an ...
>
> For example, my page at http://www.nzetc.org/ is also http://nzetc.org/.
> because neither is unique, the current wording would not let me use either.
>
> cheers
> stuart
>
>


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