Re: [tei-council] TEI conformance issues

I've been chewed out for it recently, but I agree with Martin 🙂. Sent from my phone.

On Mar 17, 2017, at 14:36, Martin Holmes wrote:

Hi Lou,

Yes, my position is that conformance is a useful concept only if it can be assessed programmatically (presumably through validation); but there is another aspect of "using TEI correctly" which needs another name.

We could have "syntactic conformance" (validity) versus "semantic conformance".

We could have "conformance" versus "compliance".

We could have "TEI-valid" versus "TEI-conformant".

Cheers, Martin

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On 2017-03-17 10:59 AM, Lou Burnard wrote: Hi Martin and thanks for your feedback.

You're right about the customized subset blob being in the wrong place. The problem is that a customized subset may or may not overlap a TEI subset. Maybe it should float above it. Or something.

Thanks also for reminding me to say something about the @source: that's a real omission.

Would it be fair to summarize your position as saying that TEI conformance can only be assessed automatically? And that any modification which results in something other than a pure TEI subset is ipso facto non conformant? It's a reasonable (ish) position : I just wanted to be sure.

Anyone else want to put their head above the parapet?

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On 17/03/17 15:40, Martin Holmes wrote: I'm still puzzled by this diagram. Your description of a "customized subset" suggests that it may validate documents which are not valid against tei_all, whereas the blob for it falls squarely within the TEI subset box.

As far as I'm concerned, I would make it even simpler: any customization that validates files which are not valid against tei_all is an extended subset. It extends the TEI by providing options (perhaps new elements or attributes, perhaps just new content models for existing elements) which were not available before.

I think the definition of TEI conformance should be that all files valid against a schema generated from the customization also validate against a tei_all schema generated from the same P5 subset used to create the first schema (so the TEI versions used must be the same). Anything else is an extension.

This is a purely mechanical test, of course. It doesn't check whether you're using <title> to tag measurements or <name> to tag bold text. I think adherence to the spirit of the prose definitions and descriptions needs a different word to describe it (and a human to judge it).

Cheeers, Martin

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On 2017-03-17 06:24 AM, Lou Burnard wrote: I've been thinking about what the Guidelines say about conformance in chapter 23, following Michael's spate of tickets and the subsequent debate last month. It seemed to me it might be helpful to establish whether the Council agrees about what the notion of conformance *ought to mean* before trying to make sure that the text of the Guidelines express it. So I have prepared a little (really little!) document for you to read and disagree or (hopefully) not with. All comments welcomed.

The document is at http://lb42.github.io/W/conformance.html (there was an earlier version on my foxglove blog, but now that I've got my ceteicean foo back I'll be maintaining this document on github instead)

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