[tei-council] experimental modules?

[Rebecca Welzenbach]

Earlier, Sebastian wrote

> I just changed Roma (for next release) to remove MS, dict, speech, drama, corpus from list;
> I think they are misleading. do you all agree?

Do you mean you removed them from the "Create Customization from
template" drop down menu at http://www.tei-c.org/Roma/?  I second
Martin's request for clarification about why it is misleading to
include them here.

I agree that http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Customization/ could be
clearer in several ways.

1) Would it make sense to change the heading of "Customizations
provided by the TEI Consortium" to "Customizations maintained by the
TEI Consortium"? (or "supported"?) To me, this clarifies that
customizations on this list involve modules that are part of the
Guidelines and are updated with each release.

2) I agree that the label "more restricted or experimental" is a
problem. "Restricted" and "experimental" aren't the same thing, and
it's not clear whether a customization on this list falls under one or
the other, so this grouping isn't useful. It's also not clear what or
who is "restricted," and in what way. I think it means "customization
with a small, highly specialized set of tags," but it would be easy to
interpret this as "only available to subscribers/experts/anyone but
you." Further, if you did guess the right meaning of "restricted," you
might be even more confused because most of the customizations on this
list are expansive (TEI plus), not restricted!

My guess is that the Odds customization is listed here not because
it's experimental, but because it's a very restricted tag set. But
this should be changed so that Odds is presented on its own. It's
designed for a totally different purpose than the other
customizations. Presenting it as belonging to the same group as "TEI
with MathML" is misleading.

The experimental customizations, if they can be confirmed, could be
grouped together, but it might be better to just do away with this
grouping altogether.

3) To reply to Kevin's comment:

>I find "TEI Community Customizations" to be clear that these
> are not endorsed by the TEI, so I'm not sure this is needed.  We could
> add a brief statement to this effect just after the heading.  Thoughts?

Once the other categories are clarified, I think "TEI Community
Customizations" becomes sufficiently clear,

Becky