[tei-council] TEI Simple update

[Sebastian Rahtz]

On 29 Jun 2014, at 16:26, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:

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

> 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.

I was not imaging that. I was thinking an extra chapter, if we deem
it appropriate; or more likely a separate doc like Tite and Lite


> 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.
definitely not!

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

I suspect Martin wrote that sentence. dont worry about it.

> 
> '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.

you may be reading too much into the somewhat florid prose. 

> The former is difficult to imagine, while the latter is 
> going to leave lots of room for interpretation.

indeed. we can but try.

> 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?

the future lasts for about 10 years on average. HTML will see us out.

> 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

in it’s mad way :-} 

> 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?
better than nothing, though?

> 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?
maybe we will. I at least do have not any definitive decision made.
that paper is illustrative of a process we may try

> 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;”?
I’d be very surprised if we kept @style in the model for Simple.

> 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 think again this is Martin’s flowery prose leading you astray. interesting but
out of scope.
> 
> 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?

you don’t get what I am trying to do there. I want to be able to unequivocally
say “there are no <persName> here not because I  didn’t encode them but
because there are no names in the text”. you can’t work that out for yourself.

> 
> Typos etc.:

its kind of you … but this is all with Mellon now, to deliver their judgement in a
few weeks.


--
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.