Dear Council,

Last week we (SB, RV, HC, MS) had a productive call with Martin Holmes and Duncan Paterson on issue #1805 (https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/1805), the new <uniHan> element.  

These are the full minutes (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JsEaZU1H7EJMwXJmNgRLjOZoJOg6AHzMcDM41zbmXl0/edit#) and here is the summary of our proposal (please correct me if I forgot something):

We have all agreed that the introduction of a new element is a good idea. But we then came to the conclusion to better call it <unihanProp>. In the course of this, we would suggest to introduce two more elements, <localProp> and <unicodeProp>. The three elements should be child elements of <char> and <glyph> and have @name and @value (instead of the property name in <localName>/<unicodeName> and <value>). Consequently, this would necessitate to deprecate <charProp>.

• Phase 0: Create att.gaijiProperties with @name and @value, to be used by <unicodeProp>, <localProp>, and <unihanProp>.
• Phase 1: add the new <unicodeProp>, <unihanProp>, and <localProp> elements with closed valList for unicodeProp/@name and unihanProp/@name, along with prose changes.
• NOTE: The entry for “charProp” in the content models of <char> and <glyph> becomes instead “ ( charProp* | ( unicodeProp | unihanProp | localProp )* )”, and a) <charProp> is deprecated (for some years), and b) the three new elements are members of a new class that has a required @name (which used to be the content) and a maybe required @value (which used to be the sibling <value>).
• Phase 2: Test the more aggressive validation of all @values based on @name and regexes from TR 38. If it’s not too onerous to run and to maintain, integrate it.
• Phase 3: Update prose and specs for <unicodeName> and <localName> to deprecate the old mechanisms and recommend the new attributes.
• Phase 4: Write scripts to pull values from Unicode documents as part of the TEI build process to validate @name and @value.

This is the current mechanism:

<charProp>
<localName>daikanwa</localName>
<value>36</value>
</charProp>

And this would be the new one:

<char>

 …

<localName property="daikanawa" value="36" />

  …

</char>

And here a <unihanProp> example:

<char>

…

      <unihanProp property="kRSUnicode" value="r1"/>

…

</charProp>

Please let us know what you think of our proposal soon. As soon as we give Duncan the green light, he will work on the implementation.

Just for clarification: this will not go into the January release.

Best wishes,

Martina