[tei-council] list types and rends: bug 460

Sun Dec 22 13:45:46 EST 2013

On 13-12-22 10:12 AM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>
> On 22 Dec 2013, at 17:54, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:
>> I see nothing in the definition of @n which suggests it's intended for transcribing things that actually appear in the text:
>>
>> <http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-att.global.html#tei_att.n>
>>
>> Are there other instances in which we ask people to put transcribed text into attributes? I thought the war on attributes was supposed to eliminate this sort of thing entirely. It seems especially bad when <label> is sitting there for precisely this purpose.
>
> if you want a glorious example of our madness, look at att.global.xml:
>
>                <bibl n="   1">
>                <bibl n="   2">
>                <bibl n="   3”>
>
> what on earth are those spaces/tabs doing in @n, I wonder??

That is very hideous. I couldn't bear it so I've removed them. But even 
more amusing is the following French example, in which although the 
nasty @n attributes remain, the @xml:base attribute which is supposed to 
be the point of the example has been deleted. Urg. Should I make up a 
phony @xml:base for that one?

> but consider these:
>
>            <divGen n="Index Nominum" type="NAMES"/>
>            <divGen n="Index Rerum" type="THINGS”/>
>
> what is “Index Rerum” if not literal text? mind you, that suggests to me that <divGen> should support <head>.

I've always assumed that divGen is most likely to be used to create a 
modern, external list of contents, rather than to hopefully reconstruct 
programmatically something that appears in the original text; my 
experience with original TOCs is that they're inevitably inconsistent or 
idiosyncratic, and it would be impractical to try to reconstruct them 
mechanically.

>
> @n "gives a number (or other label) for an element”, which surely is something that should have been killed the The Attribute Wat.

I have no objection to its being used to provide a label, but not when 
that label is in the original text.

Cheers,
Martin

> --
> Sebastian Rahtz
> Director (Research) of Academic IT
> University of Oxford IT Services
> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>