[tei-council] TEI Simple update

[Martin Holmes]

A few devil's-advocate responses from my first reading:

This bit is obviously important for us: "5 Full integration of TEI 
Simple into the TEI Guidelines and infrastructure with ongoing 
maintenance by the TEI Technical council."

What will this look like? I'm imagining, for instance, that on the 
reference page for an element which is used in Simple there's a "Simple" 
link which shows you an alternative reference page, which includes any 
constraints on content or attributes in the Simple environment, along 
with processing expectations from Simple's processing model. The budget 
costs this work at $3,600 and assigns it only one month. That suggests 
that what is envisaged is something along these simple lines, rather 
than any wholesale rewrite of Guidelines chapters.

"The first step in this project will be the definition of the TEI Simple 
dtd or schema." Why DTD? Whywhywhy?

'A "cradle to grave" processing model is at the heart of this project.' 
I'm not sure about that phrase "cradle to grave". It presupposes that 
output formatting can be characterized either in a language that can be 
assumed never to change, or in a more abstract manner which we can 
expect to be able to map onto changing rendering technologies 
indefinitely. The former is difficult to imagine, while the latter is 
going to leave lots of room for interpretation. Later on, the document 
is more explicit in saying that the processing model will be represented 
in HTML and CSS; that's very specific and short-term, surely? HTML5 has 
actually brought HTML somewhat closer to TEI in adding a lot of 
conceptual elements such as <main>, <section>, <aside>, <summary> and 
<details>, and we can expect that this process might continue. Isn't it 
a bit shaky to argue that mapping (for instance) <tei:div> to 
<html:section> or <html:div>, and saying that it's display: block, 
constitutes a processing model?

If the main objective is to map to HTML/CSS, at least initially, why 
keep @rend? Since you just have to map all your @rend values to CSS 
anyway, why not specify that CSS be used exclusively, through @style and 
[@]rendition?

What happens when someone encodes an element in such a way as to violate 
the expected processing model? For instance, <persName> is defined in 
the table as an inline element. What if someone has block-level 
<persName>s in their text, and encodes them with @style="display: 
block;"? Is this a violation of some kind? Or will the processing model 
define precisely how this overriding of default expectations should be 
handled?

The discussion of BlackLab reminded me of Philologic. Should Philologic 
be mentioned? It also added XML-awareness to a traditional relational 
database query engine. Also, should it be mentioned that Lucene is 
already integrated into eXist, giving the best of text-search combined 
with XML structural awareness?

I'm not convinced of the need for this extra header mechanism to encode 
machine-readable explanations of what is or isn't in the text. Surely 
any machine worth its salt can ask "descendant::(s|cl|phr|w|m)" or 
whatever to discover what tags or attributes have or haven't been used?


Typos etc.:

"this will be used (possibly with proposed extensions to the ODD 
language) to secure map all the elements of Simple to the CRM" (s/b 
"securely").

"The TEI standard and all documents related to the maintenance of that 
standard are fully in the public domain. So will TEI Simple and all 
documentation relating to it." The absence of a verb in the second 
sentence jars a bit.

"widely known in the TEI community for his work on anything that involve 
the transformation of a TEI document into something else." (s needed on 
"involve").

This paragraph appears twice in section 7: "Lou Burnard will be one of 
the consultants. We expect to identify the other(s) by midsummer. The 
assignment of consultant time to different phases of the project remains 
to be worked out, but will generally follow the proportions of the 
budget allocations in the work program outlined above. "

On 14-06-29 04:13 AM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> I’ll be briefing you tomorrow on the contents of http://users.ox.ac.uk/~rahtz/TEISimpleProposal.docx,
> so it would be useful if you could look at it in advance.
>
> As James will explain, we need to give an assurance about its future.
> --
> Sebastian Rahtz
> Director (Research) of Academic IT
> University of Oxford IT Services
> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>
> Não sou nada.
> Nunca serei nada.
> Não posso querer ser nada.
> À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.
>