[tei-council] targetLang in att.pointing and schemaSpec

[Martin Holmes]

I think the original @targetLang on <schemaSpec> is doing a completely 
different job from the new one, isn't it? I think its purpose and 
semantics are clear from the description:

<http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-schemaSpec.html>

although I don't know if anyone has ever used it. Given that ODD is 
meant to be broader than TEI, someone may well use it at some point, if 
they're working with a specification that allows element or attribute 
names in different languages, so I'd recommend leaving it. I think it's 
OK to have two attributes with the same name doing different jobs in 
different contexts (although it's obviously not ideal). If we were to 
make a change, I'd recommend changing schemaSpec/@targetLang to 
@namingLang, or something like that.

Cheers,
Martin

On 12-04-25 04:26 AM, Piotr Bański wrote:
> Thanks to Stuart's wiki list, I noticed that targetLang is now defined
> in two places: (a) att.pointing (new) and (b) schemaSpec (old).
>
> They don't differ in the datatype, but in the semantics ((a) identifies,
> (b) apparently prescribes) and the context ((a) accompanies @target and
> points at a remote resource, (b) acts locally; the Schematron rule for
> (a) is not applicable to (b)).
>
> (b) is listed in 23.4.1 (description pulled from the spec, there is no
> independent discussion of it), and actually, I don't fully understand
> what it is meant to do: "specifies which language to use when creating
> the objects in a schema if names for elements or attributes are
> available in more than one language".
>
> What should I do?
>
> 1. leave them as they are, effectively (b) becoming now a local override
> of (a), just like in the case of e.g. @type (but note that the situation
> is not fully analogous!)
>
> 2. rename (a), but it makes so much sense to leave this name, cf. [1],
> because it really nicely goes together with @target, and renaming it to
> the originally suggested "refLang" would create the somewhat misleading
> network of @target, @refLang (supposed to always accompany @target) and
> @targetLang (supposed NOT to accompany @target).
>
> [1]:
> https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3288293&group_id=106328&atid=644065
>
> 3. create a ticket for renaming (b) to e.g. objectLang (as its
> description suggests)?
>
> Thanks,
>
>    P.