[tei-council] Further purification

[Sebastian Rahtz]

On 5 Jan 2014, at 17:57, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:

> 
> We do seem to be looking at a host of fairly major suggested changes to ODD and ODD processing at the moment, so perhaps we need a little working group to come up with a full-scale proposal. Once the text-direction stuff is off my table, I'd be happy to get involved with that; I'm supposed to be doing various documentation enhancements to our page on getting started with ODDs, and it would be good to write a complete revision of that page as part of a larger process to improve the overall system.
> 

I am torn between saying “yes, since we’re tearing everything apart with nuODD, lets do this as well” and “change as few things as possible at a time”.
Since what you propose is a convention about how the TEI uses ODD, not a change to ODD itself, or the processing, I incline to the latter
view today. The facility you suggest of an element pointing at the attribute of another element is not actually needed at the moment, after all.

> I think this would be a major simplification, actually, don't you? @idents could be prefaced with the class name and thus be globally (in the world of P5) unique.

hmm, i am not sure that we have agreed on a problem we’re trying to solve….

simply pushing all attributes into classes would result in creating 183 new classes, which would interfaces in a scary way.
of course, along the way, we’d merge some of them, but all the easy ones have been done already in the Great Class War.

I’d suggest that the higher priority is taking those element-specific attributes which are only distinct because they have a
different description, valList or more constrained datatype than the similarly-named attribute in a class, and doingf
the local modification. Once we have done that, we end up with a more coherent TEI and a much small problem space.

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