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

[Piotr Bański]

On 25/04/12 14:45, Martin Holmes wrote:
> 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>

Indeed, on the second reading I understand what these "objects" are
supposed to be. And you're right, namingLang would be a reasonable
choice, targetLang seems actually a bit unfortunate in this context.

  P.

> 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.