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Next call: January 18
by Scholger, Martina (martina.scholger＠uni-graz.at) 15 Jan '19

15 Jan '19

Dear all, this is the agenda for our next call on Friday, January 18 (16:00-17:30 EST, 21-22:30 GMT, 22:00-23:30 CET) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n84gm-VcqR-UjBV1mDyd-l5PN-cgKYM2CD5QPAh… Please add topics / issues to the agenda. @Hugh: can we use this meet link again: https://meet.google.com/rnm-hjax-dgg ? Best wishes, Martina

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unihanProp element #1805
by Scholger, Martina (martina.scholger＠uni-graz.at) 14 Jan '19

14 Jan '19

Dear Council, Last week we (SB, RV, HC, MS) had a productive call with Martin Holmes and Duncan Paterson on issue #1805 (https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/1805) the new <uniHan> element. These are the full minutes (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JsEaZU1H7EJMwXJmNgRLjOZoJOg6AHzMcDM41zb…) and here is the summary of our proposal (please correct me if I forgot something): We have all agreed that the introduction of a new element is a good idea. But we then came to the conclusion to better call it <unihanProp>. In the course of this, we would suggest to introduce two more elements, <localProp> and <unicodeProp>. The three elements should be child elements of <char> and <glyph> and have @name and @value (instead of the property name in <localName>/<unicodeName> and <value>). Consequently, this would necessitate to deprecate <charProp>. * Phase 0: Create att.gaijiProperties with @name and @value, to be used by <unicodeProp>, <localProp>, and <unihanProp>. * Phase 1: add the new <unicodeProp>, <unihanProp>, and <localProp> elements with closed valList for unicodeProp/@name and unihanProp/@name, along with prose changes. * NOTE: The entry for "charProp" in the content models of <char> and <glyph> becomes instead " ( charProp* | ( unicodeProp | unihanProp | localProp )* )", and a) <charProp> is deprecated (for some years), and b) the three new elements are members of a new class that has a required @name (which used to be the content) and a maybe required @value (which used to be the sibling <value>). * Phase 2: Test the more aggressive validation of all @values based on @name and regexes from TR 38. If it's not too onerous to run and to maintain, integrate it. * Phase 3: Update prose and specs for <unicodeName> and <localName> to deprecate the old mechanisms and recommend the new attributes. * Phase 4: Write scripts to pull values from Unicode documents as part of the TEI build process to validate @name and @value. This is the current mechanism: <charProp> <localName>daikanwa</localName> <value>36</value> </charProp> And this would be the new one: <char> ... <localName property="daikanawa" value="36" /> ... </char> And here a <unihanProp> example: <char> ... <unihanProp property="kRSUnicode" value="r1"/> ... </charProp> Please let us know what you think of our proposal soon. As soon as we give Duncan the green light, he will work on the implementation. Just for clarification: this will not go into the January release. Best wishes, Martina

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GitHub & CI server questions
by Syd Bauman 07 Jan '19

07 Jan '19

1) Is there a continuous integration server (Jenkins or otherwise) that has picked up the new sydb-radd Stylesheets branch and is building with it? 2) Anyone know what the little orange dot or red X after a commit is on GitHub? Here [1] is a small (thus low quality) screenshot of [2], which no longer has the orange dot, that shows what I'm asking about. I'm mildly suspicious that these might be related questions. [1] https://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/4TEICouncil/screenshot_for_GitHub_questi… [2] https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets/commits/sydb-radd/odds/odd2odd.xsl

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<specGrpRef> processing
by Syd Bauman 07 Jan '19

07 Jan '19

I don't get it. Can someone explain to me what the template for <specGrpRef> in odds/odd2odd.xsl is doing around line 489 (dev branch)? It looks like the structure is: <choose> <when test="LOCAL POINTER"> <apply-templates select="CHILDREN OF THAT WHICH IS POINTED TO"/> </when> <otherwise> <for-each select="THAT WHICH IS POINTED TO">  <choose> <when test="child::specGrp"> ???? <apply-templates select="child::specGrp/child::*"/> </when> <otherwise> <apply-templates select="child::*"/> </otherwise> </choose> </for-each> </otherwise> <choose> I find this bizarre, but I may be missing something here. A specGrpRef/@target is supposed to point to a <specGrp>. A <specGrp>, of course, can contain children <specGrp>s (not that any of ours do that). So it looks to me like ... ... given the following somewhere in file A.xml <specGrp xml:id="sciencyStuff"> <elementRef key="measureGrp"/> <elementRef key="measure"/> <specGrp xml:id="detailedScienceStuff"> <elementRef key="unit"/> <elementRef key="num"/> </specGrp> </specGrp> ... and the following in file B.xml <specGrpRef target="A.xml#sciencyStuff"/> then odd2odd.xsl will only process 'unit' and 'num', not 'measureGrp' and 'measure', for which I can see absolutely no reason. Am I going nuts, here? Was there a period in ODD history when a <specGrpRef> would point to the *parent* of the desired <specGrp>, not to the <specGrp> itself?

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Re: [Tei-council] Stylesheets: rub out tei: prefix?
by James Cummings 04 Jan '19

04 Jan '19

Hi all, I simultaneously agree that explicitness is good and tend to use xpath-default-namespace all the time myself. I also remember learning from Sebastian that you *always* check namespaces first when something goes wrong. ;-) But since ODDs are always written in TEI (even non-TEI ODDs), it makes sense to me to use default namespace for TEI. I'd vote 4. Many thanks, James -- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings(a)newcastle.ac.uk Senior Lecturer in Late-Medieval Literature and Digital Humanities School of English, Newcastle University ________________________________ From: Tei-council <tei-council-bounces(a)lists.tei-c.org> on behalf of Lou Burnard <lou(a)OX.AC.UK> Sent: 04 January 2019 15:07:27 To: Raffaele Viglianti; Elisa Beshero-Bondar Cc: Peter Stadler; Lou Burnard; TEI Council; Martin Holmes Subject: Re: [Tei-council] Stylesheets: rub out tei: prefix? FWIW, I agree with Raffaele and Peter in preferring the explicitness and clarity of a prefix. Sebastian always used to say that whenever a stylesheet didn't behave as expected, it was a namespace problem. But if Syd is producing a new version, clearly he has the right to make whatever cosmetic changes he is more comfortable with. Might be a good idea to keep the old version around for a while though, just to check nothing has been broken by such changes, if I may state the obvious. On 04/01/2019 11:44, Raffaele Viglianti wrote: I always use prefixes. I think it helps with clarity and feels more rigorous/consistent. So my preference would be 5. Raff On Fri, Jan 4, 2019, 5:09 AM Elisa Beshero-Bondar <ebbondar(a)gmail.com<mailto:ebbondar@gmail.com> wrote: By the way, I think there’s a way to do it in pure Schematron, but I am not sure (have to check) if it can be done in the ODD context. If I remember right for pure Schematron at least, the question is whether you have to set the prefix on the Schematron elements or the TEI ones. Elisa Sent from my iPhone > On Jan 4, 2019, at 5:05 AM, Elisa Beshero-Bondar <ebbondar(a)gmail.com<mailto:ebbondar@gmail.com>> wrote: > > Having worked with setting default namespaces rather a lot in various contexts (XSLT, XQuery, Schematron, I vote enthusiastically for 1). This really just amounts to a change that reduces verbosity, as Syd indicates, but also reflects the default centrality of the TEI in the Stylesheets anyway. And it is a pain to have to remember the default prefix all the time when we gave to edit. > > Elisa > > Sent from my iPhone > >> On Jan 4, 2019, at 3:54 AM, Peter Stadler <pstadler(a)mail.uni-paderborn.de<mailto:pstadler@mail.uni-paderborn.de>> wrote: >> >> I honestly prefer the verbosity of 5) — and I don’t think these XPath expressions can be significantly simplified nor compressed by removing those namespace prefixes. >> But just to make double sure: This is just a (proposed) cosmetic change due to your personal preference, right? This wouldn’t be bad thing, though, and I think you deserve to do it your way since you are the ODD one :) >> >> Cheers >> Peter >> >>> Am 04.01.2019 um 02:18 schrieb Syd Bauman <s.bauman(a)northeastern.edu<mailto:s.bauman@northeastern.edu>>: >>> >>> The current odd2odd.xsl (like most of the stylesheets) uses the >>> explicitly bound namespace prefix "tei:" in XPaths. I am inclined to >>> use @xpath-default-namespace and get rid of them. I think our XPaths >>> are often already long enough to wrap around even a wide screen >>> twice, and things like "ancestor::tei:teiHeader" are just harder to >>> read. >>> >>> Please vote (fast): >>> 1) I very much want to get rid of the "tei:" prefix in XPaths >>> 2) I prefer to get rid of them, but don't care much >>> 3) Makes no difference to me, mate >>> 4) I prefer to keep them, but don't care much >>> 5) I very much want to keep the "tei: prefix in XPaths >>> >>> In case you're curious, there are approximately >>> 517 tei: >>> 38 rng: >>> 15 xs: >>> 5 a: >>> 4 xml: >>> 2 sch: >>> prefixes in odd2odd.xsl. (Looking only in attr values.) >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Tei-council mailing list >>> Tei-council(a)lists.tei-c.org<mailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org> >>> http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Tei-council mailing list >> Tei-council(a)lists.tei-c.org<mailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org> >> http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council(a)lists.tei-c.org<mailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org> http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

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Stylesheets: rub out tei: prefix?
by Syd Bauman 04 Jan '19

04 Jan '19

The current odd2odd.xsl (like most of the stylesheets) uses the explicitly bound namespace prefix "tei:" in XPaths. I am inclined to use @xpath-default-namespace and get rid of them. I think our XPaths are often already long enough to wrap around even a wide screen twice, and things like "ancestor::tei:teiHeader" are just harder to read. Please vote (fast): 1) I very much want to get rid of the "tei:" prefix in XPaths 2) I prefer to get rid of them, but don't care much 3) Makes no difference to me, mate 4) I prefer to keep them, but don't care much 5) I very much want to keep the "tei: prefix in XPaths In case you're curious, there are approximately 517 tei: 38 rng: 15 xs: 5 a: 4 xml: 2 sch: prefixes in odd2odd.xsl. (Looking only in attr values.)

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Release timeline
by Scholger, Martina (martina.scholger＠uni-graz.at) 03 Jan '19

03 Jan '19

Dear Council, I hope you had some relaxing holidays and I wish you a happy new year! Thankfully, Elli and Hugh agreed to postpone the release date to January 29. This will give us a bit more time to finish some open issues. This is our suggested timeline: Refridge: Jan 17 (Thursday) - no major changes to the schema should be done after that; minor changes (wording, typos, examples, etc.) are fine. Freeze: Jan 23 (Wednesday) - no more changes can be done in the dev branch Create release branch: Jan 24 (Thursday) - after that, only minor changes (typos) can be done in the release branch Release: Jan 29 (Tuesday) I added the dates to the Google calendar. Our next Council call is between refridge and freeze, on January 18. Best wishes, Martina

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starting rub-a-dub-dub
by Syd Bauman 03 Jan '19

03 Jan '19

Exactly 1 year to the day after abandoning the project, I am restarting it. Yay! New branch for this work will be called sydb-radd. First question: is there any difference between the 'master' and 'release-3.4.0' branches of TEI? Any significant difference? And, perhaps more importantly, how would I go about asking `git` that question? (Why, you ask? Because in order to test the Stylesheets they need to be building against some version of TEI P5. I'd like to use a local version so I don't have to wait the extra second or so it takes to download it every time I test the Stylesheets. Besides, it would be nice to know definitively which version I am testing against.)

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Re: [Tei-council] rub-a-dub revisited
by James Cummings 30 Dec '18

30 Dec '18

With apologies to Syd, I've only got around to reading this now. It seems a good description to me. I'd add that before he stopped working on the Stylesheets Sebastian did recognise that although he'd moved it to be XSLT2 technically much of the way it worked was still with XSLT1 constructs. The one I discussed most with him was the interminable call-templates constructions that could be simplified significantly with functions. (And even where the same depths of constructs, it would be clearer.) Many thanks for all your hard work, James -- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings(a)newcastle.ac.uk Senior Lecturer in Late-Medieval Literature and Digital Humanities School of English, Newcastle University ________________________________ From: Tei-council <tei-council-bounces(a)lists.tei-c.org> on behalf of Syd Bauman <s.bauman(a)northeastern.edu> Sent: 24 December 2018 17:17:42 To: TEI Council Cc: Lou Burnard; Martin Holmes Subject: [Tei-council] rub-a-dub revisited Vanessa, and everyone -- I was tasked with writing up an explanation of the rub-a-dub revisited project, primarily for Vanessa, but for all, really. So here goes. background ---------- [Note -- this is intended to be a "get your head around this issue" sort of history, not a detailed highly accurate accounting. Lou and James probably know a lot more about the early history than I.] The TEI Consortium, through the TEI Council, maintains a set of stylesheets called (unimaginatively) "the stylesheets" or (not much better) "the TEI stylesheets". They were originally started (back in early 2000s?), I think, as two separate projects. The first was to have a workflow with which the TEI Guidelines, written in TEI/ODD, could be converted to HTML and print (PDF), and later ePUB, etc. The second was to provide a stylesheet for producing some semblance of readable output (HTML or PDF) from TEI Lite. It quickly became clear that these two projects had a *lot* in common, and so they were merged. And, in fact, the code base for TEI P4 and TEI P5 also had a lot in common, and they were merged, too. (We no longer support P4, though.) The main, almost sole, programmer behind this effort was the amazing Sebastian Rahtz. Sebastian was a brilliant, talented, and frighteningly fast XSLT programmer. An archaeologist by training, and an expert in the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems, Sebastian never had any formal training in CS, at least none he would confess to me. Sebastian did not believe in internal documentation (e.g., comments) and did not care about indentation or consistency of namespace prefixes (the latter two, I suspect, because he was so brilliant he parsed XML on the fly in his head :-). He wrote these stylesheets over many years, adding features (often only a few hours after a request was made) in a somewhat willy-nilly fashion. Oh, and he started this project in XSLT1, converting to XSLT2 years later. situation --------- Due to brain cancer Sebastian stopped contributing to the stylesheets in late 2015 and died in early 2016. So now we (the Council) are left with a wonderfully powerful, modularized, parameterized, flexible set of stylesheets that are ridiculously difficult to maintain. Roughly 6 months after the gut-wrenching loss of our dear friend and colleague, the TEI Council established a group of interested parties to co-operatively educate ourselves as to how these stylesheets worked. All of TEI Council plus anyone who had ever contributed to the Stylesheets repo was invited. This group (chaired by me) has evolved from a self-education group to a Stylesheets-fixing group over time. The only people still on it are Martin Holmes, Lou Burnard, and various members of Council. One of the first things this group did was map out how the Stylesheets actually work. Some of that knowledge is represented in https://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Mapping_ODD_processing. desires ------- Martin and I have a (somewhat aspirational, but somewhat realistic) plan to re-write the ODD portion of the Stylesheets from scratch. That is, we would like to write a completely new code base (in XSLT 3.0) for processing the source of P5 into the P5 outputs (in PDF via XSLFO, as opposed to via LaTeX; HTML5; ePUB; etc.), and for processing customization ODDs into schemas and documentation. We do not want to rewrite the rest of the Stylesheets, i.e. those parts that transform generic TEI Lite into useful output, and do various other conversions. (These same stylesheets are the backbone of OxGarage.) However, that would take a long time, and in the meantime we still have a nearly unmaintainable mess. cleaning up -------- -- I have often been frustrated reading Sebastian's code. I am not nearly as brilliant as he was, so I like having helpful comments along the way, proper indentation, some consistent method of variable and function names, etc. I also find long-winded XSLT 1.0 constructs where a short bit of XSLT 2.0 can do the same thing quite frustrating. So every time I dive into the stylesheets, I think "this really has to be cleaned up". But usually I don't want to do any actual cleaning, in order to keep the delta between the code base before and after whatever fix I am applying as small as possible, to make it easier to double-check that it hasn't introduced new errors. There are some people a lot smarter than I who say that it is always better to clean up a code base than re-write it from scratch. One of them wrote a lovely blog post about it. See https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/23/rub-a-dub-dub/ While I am sure there are computer scientists who disagree, it is a quite compelling article. rub-a-dub 1 --------- - So I convinced Martin that we should take a crack at cleaning the Stylesheets first (it wasn't hard). I then convinced Council of the same thing (not much harder). In late 2017 Council explicitly charged me with performing a clean up operation (called "rub a dub" or "rub a dub dub" based on what Joel called it in his blog) on a single, large, part of the Stylesheets: the odd2odd program. I spent my winter break exactly a year ago working my tail off for hours on end cleaning up code in ways that should not change the output. Pretty much every time I saved the file, I kicked off a test process to make sure the output came out the same. And it did! Every time. It wasn't until I was well over halfway through rubbing and dubbing that I discovered that, due to a misunderstanding between me & Martin (no blame on Martin, I just mistook what he said), the test procedure I was using was not actually testing odd2odd! I had been comparing the wrong output files, so of course they were the same every time. Sigh. In fact, while I blissfully thought I was doing such a great job, I had in fact mucked up the output almost beyond recognition. Sigh. rub-a-dub 2 --------- - So Martin and I redoubled our efforts on getting ODD testing in the Test2 system to work properly, and are almost finished with that. (Martin presented the Test2 system at our last Stylesheets group meeting.) Once that is done (my current goal is before I leave for a conference in Texas on Wed 09 Jan), I will attack rub-a-dub of odd2odd again, probably shortly after I get back from Texas. The over-arching goal will be to end up with a version of odd2odd that does the same thing, but is *much* easier to maintain. Some of the ancillary files (like common_functions) will likely need to be changed somewhat, too. By "the same thing" I mean "have essentially the same XML tree as output". I don't care about the incidentals of serialization, and may well sprinkle the output with comments if it seems to help. The point is I intend to try to explicitly avoid "improving" the processor as I go along. The detailed tasks I expect to work on to make it more maintainable are somewhat flexible, likely to change as I go along. But the following are the kinds of things I mean: * Reasonable indentation * Adding internal documentation * Re-factoring XSLT 1.0 constructs into XSLT 2.0 * Collapsing equivalent functions, modes, and templates where appropriate. (There are several cases where the Stylesheets have 2 or even 3 versions of what appear to be almost the same function, mode, or template.) * Changing names of functions, modes, templates, and variables in order to approach consistency * Re-factor logic to avoid double negatives where reasonable This, of course, will all be carried out in a separate branch, so as not to interfere with normal bug-fixing and the late Jan release. _______________________________________________ Tei-council mailing list Tei-council(a)lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

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rub-a-dub revisited
by Syd Bauman 24 Dec '18

24 Dec '18

Vanessa, and everyone -- I was tasked with writing up an explanation of the rub-a-dub revisited project, primarily for Vanessa, but for all, really. So here goes. background ---------- [Note -- this is intended to be a "get your head around this issue" sort of history, not a detailed highly accurate accounting. Lou and James probably know a lot more about the early history than I.] The TEI Consortium, through the TEI Council, maintains a set of stylesheets called (unimaginatively) "the stylesheets" or (not much better) "the TEI stylesheets". They were originally started (back in early 2000s?), I think, as two separate projects. The first was to have a workflow with which the TEI Guidelines, written in TEI/ODD, could be converted to HTML and print (PDF), and later ePUB, etc. The second was to provide a stylesheet for producing some semblance of readable output (HTML or PDF) from TEI Lite. It quickly became clear that these two projects had a *lot* in common, and so they were merged. And, in fact, the code base for TEI P4 and TEI P5 also had a lot in common, and they were merged, too. (We no longer support P4, though.) The main, almost sole, programmer behind this effort was the amazing Sebastian Rahtz. Sebastian was a brilliant, talented, and frighteningly fast XSLT programmer. An archaeologist by training, and an expert in the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems, Sebastian never had any formal training in CS, at least none he would confess to me. Sebastian did not believe in internal documentation (e.g., comments) and did not care about indentation or consistency of namespace prefixes (the latter two, I suspect, because he was so brilliant he parsed XML on the fly in his head :-). He wrote these stylesheets over many years, adding features (often only a few hours after a request was made) in a somewhat willy-nilly fashion. Oh, and he started this project in XSLT1, converting to XSLT2 years later. situation --------- Due to brain cancer Sebastian stopped contributing to the stylesheets in late 2015 and died in early 2016. So now we (the Council) are left with a wonderfully powerful, modularized, parameterized, flexible set of stylesheets that are ridiculously difficult to maintain. Roughly 6 months after the gut-wrenching loss of our dear friend and colleague, the TEI Council established a group of interested parties to co-operatively educate ourselves as to how these stylesheets worked. All of TEI Council plus anyone who had ever contributed to the Stylesheets repo was invited. This group (chaired by me) has evolved from a self-education group to a Stylesheets-fixing group over time. The only people still on it are Martin Holmes, Lou Burnard, and various members of Council. One of the first things this group did was map out how the Stylesheets actually work. Some of that knowledge is represented in https://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Mapping_ODD_processing. desires ------- Martin and I have a (somewhat aspirational, but somewhat realistic) plan to re-write the ODD portion of the Stylesheets from scratch. That is, we would like to write a completely new code base (in XSLT 3.0) for processing the source of P5 into the P5 outputs (in PDF via XSLFO, as opposed to via LaTeX; HTML5; ePUB; etc.), and for processing customization ODDs into schemas and documentation. We do not want to rewrite the rest of the Stylesheets, i.e. those parts that transform generic TEI Lite into useful output, and do various other conversions. (These same stylesheets are the backbone of OxGarage.) However, that would take a long time, and in the meantime we still have a nearly unmaintainable mess. cleaning up -------- -- I have often been frustrated reading Sebastian's code. I am not nearly as brilliant as he was, so I like having helpful comments along the way, proper indentation, some consistent method of variable and function names, etc. I also find long-winded XSLT 1.0 constructs where a short bit of XSLT 2.0 can do the same thing quite frustrating. So every time I dive into the stylesheets, I think "this really has to be cleaned up". But usually I don't want to do any actual cleaning, in order to keep the delta between the code base before and after whatever fix I am applying as small as possible, to make it easier to double-check that it hasn't introduced new errors. There are some people a lot smarter than I who say that it is always better to clean up a code base than re-write it from scratch. One of them wrote a lovely blog post about it. See https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/23/rub-a-dub-dub/ While I am sure there are computer scientists who disagree, it is a quite compelling article. rub-a-dub 1 --------- - So I convinced Martin that we should take a crack at cleaning the Stylesheets first (it wasn't hard). I then convinced Council of the same thing (not much harder). In late 2017 Council explicitly charged me with performing a clean up operation (called "rub a dub" or "rub a dub dub" based on what Joel called it in his blog) on a single, large, part of the Stylesheets: the odd2odd program. I spent my winter break exactly a year ago working my tail off for hours on end cleaning up code in ways that should not change the output. Pretty much every time I saved the file, I kicked off a test process to make sure the output came out the same. And it did! Every time. It wasn't until I was well over halfway through rubbing and dubbing that I discovered that, due to a misunderstanding between me & Martin (no blame on Martin, I just mistook what he said), the test procedure I was using was not actually testing odd2odd! I had been comparing the wrong output files, so of course they were the same every time. Sigh. In fact, while I blissfully thought I was doing such a great job, I had in fact mucked up the output almost beyond recognition. Sigh. rub-a-dub 2 --------- - So Martin and I redoubled our efforts on getting ODD testing in the Test2 system to work properly, and are almost finished with that. (Martin presented the Test2 system at our last Stylesheets group meeting.) Once that is done (my current goal is before I leave for a conference in Texas on Wed 09 Jan), I will attack rub-a-dub of odd2odd again, probably shortly after I get back from Texas. The over-arching goal will be to end up with a version of odd2odd that does the same thing, but is *much* easier to maintain. Some of the ancillary files (like common_functions) will likely need to be changed somewhat, too. By "the same thing" I mean "have essentially the same XML tree as output". I don't care about the incidentals of serialization, and may well sprinkle the output with comments if it seems to help. The point is I intend to try to explicitly avoid "improving" the processor as I go along. The detailed tasks I expect to work on to make it more maintainable are somewhat flexible, likely to change as I go along. But the following are the kinds of things I mean: * Reasonable indentation * Adding internal documentation * Re-factoring XSLT 1.0 constructs into XSLT 2.0 * Collapsing equivalent functions, modes, and templates where appropriate. (There are several cases where the Stylesheets have 2 or even 3 versions of what appear to be almost the same function, mode, or template.) * Changing names of functions, modes, templates, and variables in order to approach consistency * Re-factor logic to avoid double negatives where reasonable This, of course, will all be carried out in a separate branch, so as not to interfere with normal bug-fixing and the late Jan release.

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