[tei-council] rowing back on <mixedContent>

[Martin Holmes]

On 14-07-06 04:29 PM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>
> On 5 Jul 2014, at 16:53, Lou Burnard <lou.burnard at retired.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>>   Does model.someThing still exist if all of its members have
>> been deleted? If we think it does (as an idea in the mind of James Clark
>> or something) then the content model above is equivalent to "nothing"
>> followed by model etc.  Which is presumably feasible. If however we
>> think that a model class has no existence apart from its members, then
>> deleting all of its members is tantamount to deleting the class. In
>> which case the content model should fail because it requires something
>> that doesn't exist.
>
> It’s a philosophical conundrum we’d do well to have a final view on.

We could do with some plausible examples to work with, I think. What is 
an existing class which is actually likely to have all its members deleted?

I thought about model.global.spoken; I have lots of schemas that don't 
contain any elements from that class (incident kinesic pause shift vocal 
writing). However, anything that gets subsumed into model.global rather 
complicates the issue. Another possibility is model.offsetLike, which 
has only geogFeat and offset; these are missing from many schemas. 
model.offsetLike is used in the content model of location:

<http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-location.html>

but it's a very loose content model; the emptiness or otherwise of 
model.offsetLike wouldn't seem to affect anything here. Can anyone think 
of a better example of a class whose emptiness would be problematic for 
existing content models, and which might plausibly end up empty?

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.
>