[tei-council] Fwd: TEI TITE question

[James Cummings]

Hi MartinM,

I'm forwarding this to the council list for open discussion since 
that is publicly archived (and so you'll be able to follow the 
discussion in the archive).

I'd argue that lb/pb/cb are somehow of a higher structural 
category in the effect they have on teh text and our 
interpretation of it. Whereas sup/sub/bold/i are merely 
phrase-level highlighting.  My worry, I guess, is that if people 
have <i>text</i> they are less likely to encode the reason for 
the italics and concentrate more on presentational aspects of the 
source text rather than their intellectual interpretation. 
(Though inside sourceDoc, of course, this admittedly rather 
flimsy argument falls down entirely.)  My unexamined reservation, 
I suppose, is probably based on the idiom that it is much better 
to say what things are than what they look like, and these 
convenience syntactic sugar encodings are more about what stuff 
looks like than what function they are playing. As I said, a 
flimsy argument, but just my initial gut feeling.

What do others think?

-James


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	TEI TITE question
Date: 	Sat, 5 May 2012 23:16:00 +0000
From: 	Martin Mueller <martinmueller at northwestern.edu>
To: 	James Cummings <James.Cummings at OUCS.OX.AC.UK>



James,

has there ever been a discussion about the convenience features
of TITE (sup, sub, bold, i) becoming parts of the main TEI set,
along the lines of lb or pb being shortcuts for <milestone
unit="line"/>. I can see quite a few arguments in favour of this,
and not really many against it. It might encourage people to be
sloppy in some ways. But M<sup>rs</sup> has something going for
it over M<hi rend="sup">rs</hi>. And there are a lot of those.

MM