[tei-council] Fwd: TEI TITE question

[Lou Burnard]

Certainly no good reason to stop people defining convenience tags like 
<it> <bo> <sup> etc and we could even add a section in the place where 
<hi> is defined to explain how, if there isn't one already. We *could* 
also add them as first class TEI elements, perhaps in the transcr module 
rather than the core though.  But why do we choose these rather minimal 
indications of rendering? Shouldn't there be some tags for other kinds 
of visual salience, notably for size of letters, letter spacing etc. ? 
Oh wait, isn't that what <rendition> is for?

I also worry about the way that visual salience is not a simple matter. 
If you mark up font change alone you will often completely miss the 
point -- for example, the word/s in Roman within a paragraph in italic 
are the ones that should be tagged, not the words around them which 
happen to be in italic.



   On 06/05/12 12:29, James Cummings wrote:
> 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