[tei-council] rowing back on <mixedContent>

[Martin Holmes]

On 14-07-04 10:33 AM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>
> On 4 Jul 2014, at 18:22, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:
>
>> On 14-07-04 08:12 AM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>>> if people want DTDs, thats fine by me. I’ll convert their Pure
>>> ODD markup to DTD syntax for them. However, it may well be
>>> invalid DTD if they don’t understand what they’re doing.
>>
>> I think this is very dangerous. I know of several long-standing TEI
>> users who have never used anything except a DTD and don't know how
>> to use anything else
>
> sure. and they can shoot themselves in the foot now, using Roma, and
> make an invalid DTD. It is not hard at all.

But that's not a good situation. We should have a plan to get away from it.

>> …. their assumption is that you create an ODD file (usually with
>> Roma), you tweak it maybe in oXygen, and you get a DTD from it
>> (again usually with Roma).
>
> and their assumption would remain true, so long as we remember to
> keep the P5 source to that subset of things that make deterministic
> DTDs. Believe me, Lou, Syd and I have all invested many many hours in
> staring at TEI content models and working out why they don’t
> translate to valid DTD. Its a very delicate balancing act. Moving to
> Pure ODD, <mixedContent> or not  really wouldn’t make any difference
> to that issue.

My point is that we shouldn't be designing Pure ODD (which is what
you're doing) on the basis that it has to take account of the
limitations of DTDs.  If Pure ODD can be simpler and easier to
understand if we don't think about DTDs, then why not use this as an
opportunity to move beyond them?

>> I think they would be quite happy to move to RNG if prompted, but
>> they've never seen a reason to do it; but mainly what they want
>> from us is a system that protects them from the complexities of
>> writing actual schemas and just works.
>
> sure. no change there. and its very very hard to guarantee --

But much easier with DTDs out of the picture. Just sayin.

Cheers,
Martin

> 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.
>