[tei-council] soft deprecation of @key

[Kevin Hawkins]

On 5/20/12 5:55 PM, Lou Burnard wrote:
>    Why can only a @ref point
>> to<taxonomy>?
>
> My point was that if you *have* gone to the trouble of defining all your
> terms in a taxonomy, there's nothing to be gained by not using the
> simpler @ref="#foo" type syntax.

I was thinking of a case like:

<persName key="lccn-n78-95332">Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616</persName>

<taxonomy xml:id="lccn">
   <bibl>Library of Congress Control Number</bibl>
</taxonomy>

While not machine-processable, it provides some information to help to 
help a human reader figure out the encoding.

>>    >   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.
>>
>> I was taking a cue from:
>>
>> http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/TEI-Council-FAQ#What_is_a_.22magic_token.22.3F
>>
>> in which Stuart helpfully added a link to the Wikipedia page on "magic
>> cookie".  It appears that in computer science, people call it that.  It
>> seems that we should acknowledge the terminology of this community.
>
> I'd rather not since that's not really our target community, but if you
> insist, I'd use that term only, and maybe reference the Wikipedia page.

Well, our community uses the other term, so it would be a disservice not 
to use our own term here as well.  How about instead of "A or B" we had 
"A (also known as B)"?

>>> 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 ...
>>
>> I prefer the stronger guidance in my version.  In yours, you say "in
>> such a situation" (of data interchange) as if the TEI isn't always meant
>> to promote data interchange.
>
> Well, this may be something we have to agree to differ on. Although TEI
> is of course primarily for data interchange, it's not exclusively so.
>
> I think of @key values as being like the PUA in Unicode -- they're
> useful, but you need to know what the risks of using them are.
>
> By the way, did we actually agree to translate *every single one* of the
> @key instances into @ref:tag:wibble,foo ones? I thought we'd agreed to
> keep some, to show that the old methods were still usable.

We did not agree to translate every single one, and I did not in fact 
translate every single one.  according to the minutes from Paris, "We 
should modify the Guidelines to make the point that people should switch 
to @ref wherever @key is mentioned."  The ones I left were cases where:

* usage of @key is being illustrated
* instances in which the value of @key was a known public scheme, like 
<country key="FR"/> (per decision in Ann Arbor)