Re: [tei-council] Recommendations on values of @xml:id (FR #540)

On 15-02-23 06:58 AM, Raffaele Viglianti wrote:

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 5:22 AM, Majewski Stefan wrote:

While we could argue that this is project-management specific and beyond

...

the scope of the guidelines, this appears not entirely convincing, as one of the aims of using XML in the first place and using TEI in the second, is to create resources that are likely to be re-used.

There isn't one strategy that the TEI can recommend to make one's TEI more likely to be re-used, the guidelines can only warn about the problem and perhaps suggest a strategy. Using mnemonic ids instead of random ones even exacerbates this problem or re-usability: how many TEI files may end up with xml:id="div1-lg1"? Pre-pending a file's unique identifier greatly reduces the problem, but does not solve it.

There should definitely be some discussion of the required scope of uniqueness for any specific project or document. If you have only one document, that's the scope of the uniqueness requirement, and it's enforced by XML rules. If you require uniqueness across a project, then you need to have a structured approach to id creation (such as prepending document ids) and put mechanisms in place to assist in suggesting new ids and constraining uniqueness across the project. If you want globally-unique ids, that's a whole other issue--but are there really any contexts in which this is useful?

Anyway, it seems to me that generally the majority of the council would prefer to have at least some examples of ID usage on the guidelines. I would still refrain from calling them "recommendations" because of the variety of valid approaches that people are suggesting. But we can still offer two or three suggestions based on style and personal preference rather than actual effectiveness of a strategy, because it's too dependent on extra-textual contingencies.

Agreed. We should probably look to see if any other XML projects have such recommendations too (DocBook, DITA, etc.). Cheers, Martin