On 25/05/16 15:48, Lou Burnard wrote:
James (copied below) seems to be the only person to have expressed an opinion on what we should do about TEI Simple in reaction to my comments of the 16th. My reactions to his reactions are as follows:
(1) re the header. Yes, if Sebastian were still with us, I would be arguing with him about the way Simple fails to simplify the Header. The point is that if we want TEi Simple to be a useful entry point to the TEI it cannot just do hand waving about the Header. In practice or de iure, beginners need to be told how to write a useful header, and the Simple schema has to enforce that. Faced with the same problem, Tite tries to duck the issue by not requiring a header at all, which is not what I would recommend, even though maybe it would be more honest. But no, you need a header in your TEI Simple document, just as you do in your TEI Lite one.
I would still be in favour of providing exemplars for best practice in use of the header and recommend basic ways to do things, but still not constraining it in any significant manner. (Other than the prose/structurd alternative content models I'd be willing to vote for decisions on single ways to do things.) We can use schematron (as I believe the ODD already does) to disallow certain metadata elements under text.
(2) Martin's polemics are always fun to read but sometimes a bit less clear about what he actually wants. It's not unlike someone saying "we must build a wall to keep out the mexicans" -- you can see why they might want to do that, but it's not clear that they've really thought through the implications, or what the exact process for achieving the goal might be.
I'm sure he'd be glad to discuss this in-depth with you. I'd rather we concentrate on getting at least a minimally-agreed TEI Simple into the TEI Exemplars, so that he can report that it is done, with the understanding that details of TEI Simple will of course change as we get bug and feature requests for at least the first few releases.
(3) I stand by my earlier offer to produce a shorter sharper document, as a candidate for the TEI branded version of the TEI Simple ODD and have started work on same.
I would be happy with that (as long as all existing TEI Simple documents still validate).... I'm not wedded to the prose at all. -James -- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk Academic IT Services, University of Oxford