On 16/07/16 15:32, James Cummings wrote:
1. Do we REALLY want to include event, state, note as well as name ? I would have thought just name and note was enough. Otherwise, we need to explain when you use note, when event, and when state.
I would have agreed if note was datable (which, to be honest, I can see an argument for...).
The trouble is that if NOTE were datable, I'd assume that the dating related to the act of annotation, not the content. Or at the very least that it was ambiguous. A note might well contain a whole lot of chronologically distinct matters. By and large datable things are events and states, not discussions of same.
To me these are very different semantic categories. Naming of something, recording something happened, and recording its state, with notes for anything else. I could see an argument that we don't need event and state.
That (not going the extra mile to include event and state) was indeed my proposal. I agree that it's useful to record a name distinctly for a thing, but I am proposing that in Simple all we allow is for a bunch of notes. Of course those could be typed to distinguish ones about states from ones about events, if you like.
(If you accept that <state type="birth" when="1955"/> makes sense.)
Err, no it doesn't. With the possible exception of elephants, birth is not a state but an event.
2. The current doc for Simple mentions only @when @calendar and @period of the datable attributes. Do we REALLY want @notBefore and @notAfter and @from and @to as well?
Interestingly, I would have got rid of @calendar and @period -- one can document in prose in the header that one is using the Julian or Mayan calendar... if you are using multiple ones in a single document then your encoding needs aren't 'Simple' in my mind. I would have said @when, @notBefore/@notAfter. Where things need @from/@to I'd probably had done something else.
OK, happy to remove calendar and add notb4 and notAfter if that works better. @period is useful so you can say e.g. <date period="2ndEmpire"> when you dont want to be any more precise. On name vs persName etc. see the comment I am about to add to the ticket.