I've been passing my happy whitsun reading and scribbling increasingly
irritated notes on a copy of the current state of the TEI Simple
documentation, currently located in the P5/Exemplars branch of the
TEI-simple branch. It contains the following discrete chunks of verbiage:
1. Some polemic about why TEI Simple is a good thing, and its design goals
2. A simple introduction to XML
3. A presentation of the elements used by Simple along with examples,
almost entirely copied from the equivalent part of the TEI Lite document
we all know and love (but extended with some ruminations on e.g.
hyphenation)
4. A table showing frequency of Simple elements in various
corpora/collections
5. A discussion of the processing model elements, and how they are used
in Simple (and indeed how some of them are not used in Simple)
6. A schemaSpec which actually defines the TEI Simple schema.
Here's the thing. How much of this do we think should be maintained by
the Council as an Exemplar? How much of it should be regarded as of
historical interest? How much should be published/archived/maintained
elsewhere?
The part of this which matters is of course the schemaSpec and
(probably) the associated prose describing and instantiating the
elements. So my first step was to make that valid (the spec had not been
updated to reflect our decision that <param> should be an empty
element). At the same time I did my best to make the document as a whole
follow our usual praxis as regards depiction of XML constructs (i.e. use
of <gi>, <tag>, <att>, <ident>, <code> etc. (Regrettably, this led to my
reading (2) above more closely than I would have liked)
Next, I checked to see whether the doc contained a <specDesc> for each
<elementRef> in the ODD. This is a good way of ensuring that the schema
contents match the documentation -- that everything the schema makes
available is actually discussed or instantiated somewhere. There are
166 elements in Simple, all but 33 of which have a <specDesc>. Which is
definitely not bad, but could be improved. In addition, it occurred to
me that since the ODD has to provide specs for all the elements that
specify a PM, these could also be enhanced to provide examples better
tailored to Simple.
I still have some reservations about the way Simple treats the Header --
it really doesn't provide much help to beginners to say "oh there's the
header you can put anything you like in there. Good luck." But I can see
I'll have to wait for the next release to see those addressed.
I found DOZENS of examples of verbiage that needs straightening out --
whether to conform to what I consider a sensible consistent style for
this kind of writing, or to address errors of fact, or to remove
redundant waffle or to make hand-waving generalities more precise.
So what's the way forward? As James said at the FTF, Martin Mueller
wants to see Simple "replace" or "merge with" TEI Lite in some vague
way, We discussed that, and I don't recall any agreement that this would
on the face of it be advisable, and certainly in its current state I
would vote against doing so on the basis of this document. On the other
hand, we really ought to be putting some effort into making Simple a bit
more visible and accessible for its target audience. So I propose the
following:
-- we work on a slimmed down non-polemical straightforward version of
the Simple ODD
-- revise the discussion of TEI customisations on the website so that
it makes clear which ones are in the Council's remit (I make that Lite,
Simple, Tite, Enrich, and possibly -- if they ever get their dung
collected -- the ISO spoken one)
I'll volunteer for a first cut at the former task. Unless of course you
all say, no we like the document as it is just fine thanks.
