[tei-council] Use of @cRef

[Martin Holmes]

Hi all,

The attribute @cRef (which appears on <ref>, <ptr>, <gloss> and <term>) 
is currently a bit of a mess. I've started a bug for this:

<http://purl.org/TEI/BUGS/3480650>

Changes have to be made to @cRef -- for one thing, the attribute is 
separately defined for each element, with different datatypes. It has 
been suggested that we no longer actually need it, because its original 
function (storing a canonical reference from a scheme defined in a 
<refsDecl> element in the TEI header) can perfectly well be handled 
using @target, using a private URI scheme. However, it's arguable that 
having an attribute whose purpose is explicitly to handle private URI 
schemes (as opposed to official IANA-registered schemes) might be 
useful. If we were to switch to recommending @target and private URI 
schemes, I think we'd have to encourage people to provide resolution 
patterns for such schemes as we currently do with @cRef.

It would be helpful to get a sense of what people are currently doing 
with @cRef, and how changes are likely to affect existing projects. I 
thought about a little survey we could circulate to TEI-L -- something 
like this:

<http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?PREVIEW_MODE=DO_NOT_USE_THIS_LINK_FOR_COLLECTION&sm=Fpob1swo7qmZTEW4PbIxL9EDe24HTX6Wad91ehsQajc%3d>

What do you think about this? (Assuming you can see the survey -- I'm 
not sure exactly how SurveyMonkey works in this regard, never having 
used it before. If you can't see it, let me know and I'll copy/paste the 
questions into an email.)

I'd like to make some decisions about @cRef at the April meeting if 
that's possible, so a bit of prep now seems like a good idea.

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