Martin, is this some sort of trick? That page only has 2 instances of <defaultVal> listed, but there are roughly 65 of them. I most certainly do *not* want to move forward with these one at a time. I want to see and analyze a list of all of them. My bet is that, upon seeing said list, I am going to push for leaving <defaultVal> in, but changing its semantics so that the default value is not actually tucked into DTDs and schemas, but rather <defaultVal> is a hint for your TEI processor. After we've changed those semantics (which will take a year or whatever), I would then be happy to see <defaultVal> all over the place. And whether we should split the meanings of part=N into two separate values or not is a somewhat different question. (One which I would support wholeheartedly. That said, the current situation is not nearly so crazy as you make it out to be -- part=N indicates to your hunter/gatherer software which you use to reconstitute partial elements into aggregate elements that it does not have to pay attention to this particular element instance. It does not assert *why* your software can ignore it, which is a pity. But it's not useless in a default attr value environment.) P.S. And of course the default value of org= is "uniform" ... how many times have you even considered specifying org=composite?
OK, page is up on the wiki:
http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/DefaultVal_candidates_for_removal
I'd like to move forward with these steadily, though, otherwise there'll just be a long page left on the wiki when I leave Council and nothing will be done, so I'd like ask for any objections to the first two actually to be recorded on the wiki.