[tei-council] soft deprecation of @key

[Lou Burnard]

On 20/05/12 20:47, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
> All,
>
> At last, I've implemented http://purl.org/TEI/fr/3437509.  See the "text
> changed" links at in case you're interested:
>
> http://tei.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tei?view=revision&revision=10374
>
> Lou, over to you to review.
>
> --Kevin


Well, I think the proposed wording might be improved. The reference to 
<taxonomy> seems irrelevant -- if you use that, you'd use @ref to point 
at entries in it. And the term "magic token" is probably best not 
eternalised (magic cookie I've never heard of before -- it invites 
confusion with the other sorts of cookie.

Here's a suggested revision for the following passage added to CO :


"Since the value of the <att>key</att> attribute does not follow any 
standard syntax, can only be deciphered by a human reader (possibly by 
consulting the <gi>taxonomy</gi> element in the TEI header), and could 
coincide with a value used by another project, such <term>magic 
tokens</term> or <term>magic cookies</term> should be avoided. A 
preferred ..."


No particular syntax is proposed for the values of the <att>key</att> 
attribute, since its form will depend entirely on practice within a 
given project. For the same reason, this attribute is not recommended in 
data interchange, since there is no way of ensuring that the values used 
by one project are distinct from those used by another. In such a 
situation, a preferable ...