[tei-council] @who="all | various | unknown"

[Lou Burnard]

On 27/12/12 04:37, Martin Holmes wrote:
> One bit of my birthday chapter
> (<http://teijenkins.hcmc.uvic.ca/job/TEIP5/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/TS.html#TSBAUT>)
> says, regarding the <u> element:
>
> "Use of the @who attribute to associate the utterance with a particular
> speaker is recommended but not required. Its use implies as a further
> requirement that all speakers be identified by a person or personGrp
> element in the TEI header (see section 15.2.2 The Participant
> Description), but it may also point to another external source of
> information about the speaker. Where utterances or other parts of the
> transcription cannot be attributed with confidence to any particular
> participant or group of participants, the encoder may choose to define
> ‘participants’ such as all or various, or unknown. "
>
> @who is 1–∞ occurrences of data.pointer, so clearly its values cannot be
> "all", "various" or "unknown", unless files with those names exist as
> siblings of the file containing the @who.
>
> I think I know what this means: encoders should create e.g. <personGrp>
> elements with @xml:id="all", "various" or "unknown". But I don't think
> this is clear enough in the prose of the chapter. If I have understood
> correctly, or misunderstood, please let me know. Either way I'll expand
> this paragraph to clarify what strategy is actually being recommended here.
>

Yes. I think the references to "all" etc. are a survival from an early 
era in which @who was not necessarily a data pointer. Your proposed 
addition sounds like a very good one.