Message from Martin Mueller to the TEI-L list, pertinent to our discussion
of Lite 2.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Martin Mueller <martinmueller(a)northwestern.edu>
Date: Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 6:44 PM
Subject: More about TEI Lite
To: <TEI-L(a)listserv.brown.edu>
I read through the minutes of the Technical Council that discussed my
proposal to phase out simplePrint and merge it into a new version of TEI
Lite that includes the Processing Model. I was pleased by the
thoughtfulness of the discussion. Much of it was given over to naming the
child, and I have a half-serious suggestion about that. Why not rechristen
Lite and All TEI200 and TEI600? TEI-All has not quite 600 elements, and a
revised TEI Lite falls short of 200. But the names give you a good sense
of scale. TEI600 has a lot of elements, and TEI 200 has quite a few. The
names get you out of implicit and confusing value judgements about what is
‘lite’ or ‘simple’. It may sound too much like F150 or C300, but that’s
another matter, and some might like it for that reason.
I disagree a little with the comment that “the phrasing of 90% of the needs
of 90% of the community” is “outdated”. Pareto distributions and other
power laws are pretty universal in their application. “90 % of the needs of
90% of the users” is an excellent version of the 80/20 rule. If anything,
progress over the past quarter century may mean that the rule applies even
more now than it did when it was used in the preface to the first version
of TEI Lite.
I remember working on a moderately complex project some twenty years ago.
It was SGML rather than XML, and validation told you that things didn’t
work without telling you much about the where or what of the errors. It’s a
mystery to me now how I got it to work, though I did. Since then, the
access costs to working with any kind of XML have dropped sharply, and
folks with very little previous experience can “ramp up” quickly to doing
useful work. If you belong to that category of users, it’s probably a good
idea to ask yourself whether you can solve your encoding problem within a
space of 200 elements rather than 600, not to speak of adding your own
customization.
That takes us back to the Nobel Prize behavioural economist Richard Thayer,
who argued that in most walks of life people make better decisions if given
a limited number of standard choices, as long as they can opt out. We all
like to think that our projects are special, but typically they are not
that special. A friend of mine told me that in Medical School he learned
that “when you hear hooves behind you think horses not zebras”. Physicians
like “interesting cases”. Patients not so much.
This is good advice much of the time, and especially for groups like the
Technical Council. Any such group is likely to have a preponderance of
geeks, and geeks are more interested in exciting, new, and technically
challenging things. Steven Pinker in his recent book on writing has a whole
chapter on the problem that the hardest thing for a writer is to imagine
what the reader does not know. Geeks share this problem, and groups like
the Technical Council need to remind themselves constantly about the need
to countersteer and focus on what most users do or need most of the time.
Ben Shneiderman observed that good software should have “low thresholds and
high ceilings”. From the bread-and-butter perspective of a thriving TEI
enterprise, lowering the threshold should remain a key goal. I’m not much
of a TEI expert, but I am an expert on the attitudes and anxieties of the
key user community of people in English departments and their neighbours.
Quite a few years Jerry McGann equipped about TEI as an acronym for *terra
incognita. *Alas, the quip may still apply. The TEI has man virtues, but
preaching beyond the choir is not one of them.
It would be a good idea for the Technical Council to apply the 80/20 rule
in such a way that 80% of the work is done on lowering the thresholds.
TEI-Publisher, the happy child of the TEI Simple project, has done a lot of
good work on that front. But even there much of the documentation is not
as successful as it might be in keeping mind what the reader does not
know.
I have on occasions argued for the need of a “Small Catechism” to
accompany the “Grand Catechism” of the TEI Guidelines—a magnificent
document in some ways but not reader-friendly in others. The most useful
part of the Guidelines is Appendix C1—the easiest and quickest way to
figure out where an element may or may not occur. Since Appendix must be
based on a program, it should be possible and not very expensive to create
a version that Is populated only by the most frequently used elements (TEI
200 or whatever you call it.
>From one perspective you don’t this: it doesn’t tell you what you can’t get
from the full version. On the other hand, a TEI200 catalogue of elements
and their behaviours would give novice users a much better sense of the TEI
architecture.
--
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
TEI Technical Council Chair
Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital
Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie,
The Behrend College
Development site: https://newtfire.org
Dear all,
it’s only a few days until your/our meeting at Paderborn and I thought it high time to send you some Information!
Your meeting room for Sun–Tue will be F0.550 (the nicest room in the building!) which is located directly on the ground floor next to the entrance of the Heinz-Nixdorf-Insitute (HNI) [1]. Since room numbers are boring I labelled it <hni:egXML> – watch out for other tag names as room labels!
The room is equipped with two large screens and a projector and allows connecting via HDMI or Airplay or some other Android thing I’m not familiar with. More rooms are available for break out sessions.
All the pre-conference workshops (Mon-Tue) will be held at the HNI, too, so you will have to have regular breaks since the coffee break catering is located directly next to your room. For Sunday, I will bring some coffee, tea, and biscuits directly to your room.
The lunch breaks on Mon/Tue will be at the cafeteria free of charge for all conference participants (I hope you are all registered for the conference?)
On Sunday, I recommend to order some food because there’s not much around the HNI. A nice place might be the Pader Café, though, wich is a 10min walk away and should serve some food on Sundays according to [2].
Sunday evening you’re invited to my place (6:30pm, is that ok?) – I hope the weather will be fine and we can have a barbecue, so please let me know about your dietary restrictions and/or preferences!
Please let me know if you need anything else!
Looking forward to hosting you at Paderborn
Peter
[1] https://www.hni.uni-paderborn.de/service/raeume-im-gebaeude-f/besprechungsr… <https://www.hni.uni-paderborn.de/service/raeume-im-gebaeude-f/besprechungsr…>
[2] https://www.pader.cafe <https://www.pader.cafe/>
Dear all,
The next Stylesheets meeting is scheduled for August 24 at at 18:00Z (11:00
PDT, 14:00 EDT, 20:00 CEST).
Here you have the suggested agenda
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/11_l_MZ6M2lxhE2qtH6QUkZVxo0-OQrNgRhOnpaU…>,
but please do not hesitate to add other things to discuss.
During the last meeting, we ended up touching topics that were beyond the
Stylesheets Group’s “jurisdiction.” I added these topics to the “Paderborn
collection of topics”: I hope I wasn’t too late doing this @Elisa
<ebbondar(a)gmail.com>
Best,
H.
Greetings, Council! We need one representative from Council to serve on a
little three-person committee to award the Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity
<https://tei-c.org/activities/rahtz-prize-for-tei-ingenuity/> for 2023: one
from Council, one from Board, and one who won the award in a previous
cycle. Apparently we have a proud tradition of always running late in the
posted cycle--but we do need to get started quickly! I understand that the
little committee needs to form and issue a call for applications, likely by
early August and then start reviewing them to make a decision by the time
of the TEI / MEC conference.
This involves looking for applications, reviewing submissions and that
we'll typically announce the winner at the TEI Conference in the Annual
General Meeting. So long as you have not served on the committee 4 times
already, you're eligible to represent Council.
Are you interested in serving on the Rahtz committee to represent the
Council? If so reply to this and let me know--probably in course of the
next week--say before July 27, okay? I am willing to serve in this capacity
but I wanted to ask the group first--I am also going to be crazy busy in
August getting ready for my university classes (which start 21 August) and
the Council F2F. I'd be super grateful for anyone with a more peaceful
August schedule who is willing to serve on this committee!
Thanks,
Elisa
--
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
TEI Technical Council Chair
Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital
Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie,
The Behrend College
Development site: https://newtfire.org
Magic removal time!
OMG, I am so excited. But I have to prep slides for tomorrow, no time to do this now. Thus I am writing some notes here.
See https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.6.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-TEI.html. Note that there is a proper namespace declaration in both examples. How the BLEEP did it get there? We cannot put a namespace declaration for the empty namespace on an element in an <eg:egXML> (unless it is on an element that has an explicit prefix), because its contents need to be in the eg: namespace.
The answer is that there is magic in the Stylesheets.[1]
Now take a look at https://www.wwp.neu.edu/outreach/seminars/miami_2023-07/presentations/manus…. The source for that slide uses <egMarkup>, an element that has the same kind of namespace specification restriction. So how did the namespace declaration get there?
Simple. So simple I am annoyed at myself for not thinking of this long ago. In the source it is not a namespace declaration, it is an xmlns attribute in a namespace. Thus it makes it to the Stylesheet as an attribute node and can be processed like any other attribute. The special case in the stylesheet that processes that slide is simple, straightforward, and easy to document: “An attribute in the duck: namespace has its prefix stripped off before it is rendered in the output”.
Note
[1] Particularly in Stylesheets/common/verbatim.xsl, starting at roughly line 463.
Dear all,
The next Stylesheets meeting is scheduled for June 22 at at 18:00Z (11:00 PDT, 14:00 EDT, 20:00 CEST).
Here you have the agenda<https://docs.google.com/document/d/11_l_MZ6M2lxhE2qtH6QUkZVxo0-OQrNgRhOnpaU…>, which proposes continuing with the work on the presentation of attribute lists, since we are very close to closing that ticket. However, I am also happy to organise a different meeting just to tackle that ticket (because I recognise that having dedicated two different meetings to it is frustrating), and that way we can do something different in the next Stylesheets meeting.
Best,
H.
<http://www.unine.ch/isla>
Dear Council,
Reminder: we are meeting this Friday June 6 at 6:30 - 8am PT | 9:30 - 11am
ET | 2:30 - 4pm UTC | 3:30 - 5PM CET.
Syd has asked that we take some time to review atop ticket #2173
<https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/2173>, and it will definitely help if
we can try to do that before the meeting starts. Would you please take a
moment this week to review the ticket, and especially the ODD + Schematron
files attached to it ahead of the meeting?
Here is our agenda with the Zoom link
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mmIrn5BX3VVmsKpQ-H8GG2UZ2-3JYZKSVhtd4q-…>
(also
posted on Slack). Please feel free to add to the agenda!
Thanks,
Elisa
--
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
TEI Technical Council Chair
Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital
Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie,
The Behrend College
Development site: https://newtfire.org
