[tei-council] Spec for @n (ticket # 3441933)

[Martin Holmes]

OK, it's a ticket:

<http://purl.org/TEI/BUGS/3455686>

Assigned to me for the moment, although I'm not sure about exactly 
what's required in b) (I'm no schematron expert).

Cheers,
Martin

On 11-12-09 10:48 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
> This is fine, however... . I think  that a systematic sweep of
> <valDesc>s will show very many such discrepancies. Basically<valdesc>
> dates from a time before<datatype>s were formalised in the ODDs, and
> thus contain all sorts of descriptive garbage, much of which is now
> wrong. We have however retained them, because in some cases they
> describe useful intended constraints which we would hopefully now
> represent using<constraint>s.
>
> So, in a nut shell
>
> a) if there is a conflict between datatype and valdesc, the former is
> right and the latter should be nuked ... except that
>
> b) all valdescs need to be examined carefully to see whether they can be
> re-expressed in schematron first
>
> sounds like a job for the Proof Reader Extraordinaire to me.
>
>
> On 09/12/11 17:10, Martin Holmes wrote:
>> In<http://purl.org/TEI/BUGS/3441933>, Michelle Dalmau rightly points
>> out that the formal datatype of @n differs from the value description:
>>
>> [quote]
>> Datatype 1–∞ occurrences of data.word
>>
>> separated by whitespace
>>
>> Values 	the value may contain only letters, digits, punctuation
>> characters, or symbols: it may not contain whitespace or word separating
>> characters. It need not be restricted to numbers.
>> [/quote]
>>
>> My guess is that this arose because at some point the datatype was
>> changed to allow multiple values, but the<valDesc>   was not altered to
>> match it. I've therefore expanded the valDesc as follows:
>>
>> "The value consists of one or more instances of data.word. Each instance
>> may contain only letters, digits, punctuation
>> characters, or symbols: it may not contain whitespace or word
>> separating characters. It need not be restricted to
>> numbers."
>>
>> This seems an important issue and I'd like to get it into Laurentian, so
>> I've committed this change. If there's something I'm missing, or if it's
>> the wrong solution, please correct me asap.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Martin
>>
>

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)