TEI Council Meeting

Overview

Lou Burnard led a discussion of outstanding items on our SourceForge project bug tracker. Previously the Oxford editorial support team had prepared a three-way triage of the items: green items that have been agreed to by at least one Council member, amber items that have not been fully considered and which needed further discussion, and red items that need substantial discussion or clarification before they can be acted upon.

Council members assented to the division and agreed with the proposal that approved green items be incorporated into the next Guideline release; amber items be considered for inclusion in the next release; and red items not be considered for inclusion.

Green items

Except as noted in the following summary of discussion, all green items were okayed for implementation. LB will proceed to implement green items

1848442: Attributes missing
• EP noted that extent in gap is connected with one of the amber items (1925125) and suggested that we discuss it in connection with that item.

1852100: nameLink element should not have @ref or @key attribute

• EP said that persName does need to retain sort. LB clarified why nameLink should not have key: that attribute in a naming element points to a person. A nameLink may have an onomastic referent, but that is what nymRef is for.

2055116: Add typeDesc, analogous to handDesc

• LR notes that it will be important to document exactly how the new typeDesc element is to be used. The question arose whether handDesc and typeDesc should be mutually exclusive; as use cases were imagined for both, they should be treated as complementary.

2055122: Permit title page elements within msItem and msContents

• EP objected that this proposal is essentially a patch to allow extra elements, when the real need is to revisit physDesc usage as a whole. There was some sentiment (JC) to go ahead and implement this patch now, with the understanding that further work is needed on description of manuscripts and early printed books, but when it was noted that at the next Members’ Meeting there will be at least one paper on this topic (by Dot Porter), Council agreed to defer action on this item. Status changed to “amber”.

2055820: change content model of <w>

• DO noted a possible objection to the proposal: the content model of w was initially intended to be purely linguistic, so that allowing it to contain typography would represent a philosophical change. LB noted that we have two communities of users for w now, those interested purely in linguistic phenomena and the community of manuscript editors who want to be able to identify word-like objects for their own purposes; we may as well permit the use of the tag for both purposes. LR agreed; the proposed of w will not break existing linguistic uses, simply enable new ones.

Amber Items

2033641: erroneous “Empty element” statement in documentation
• This appears to be an artefact of a minor bug in the way the documentation is generated via our XSLT stylesheets. Sebastian Rahtz should tweak the stylesheet as needed.

1925125: Review usage and precision of @extent

• Based on discussion between LB and JC, it is proposed that extent be reserved for values of arbitrary text that are not precisely quantifiable. In addition, the attributes quantity and unit should be allowed on elements qualified by a measurement, with quantity constrained to be a number. Documentation will explain how to decide which alternative to use. Council agreed that we should try to implement this for the next release.LB will come up with a detailed proposal. Subsequently, JC and GB submitted a formal proposal regarding this ticket and ticket 1933198

2055864: Remove redundant iso-* attributes

• LB noted that this item has a lengthy SourceForge discussion. DO raised the concern that we will create confusion if we remove several of the iso- attributes but leave iso-when; as when would remain in att.datable.w3c, users might expect all the parallel att.datable.iso attributes to be available. So if we remove attributes as proposed, we should perhaps rename iso-when (which will in any case have an expanded functionality). (As an aside, DS noted that period should be an independent attribute, not classed under att.datable.w3c,) DS will confer with Syd Bauman on the ticket and return to Council with a proposal.

2055891: Placement of Schematron rules

• LB explains that there are four alternate proposals for governing the placement of Schematron rules in ODD files:
  • Status quo (as children of content)
  • as direct children of elementSpec (original Sebastian Rahtz proposal)
  • as children of a new ODD element like constraint
  • allow them to occur anywhere.

  LB asked whether Schematron rules shouldn’t be freed from the requirement to be attached to a single elementSpec. since they can refer to multiple elements or attributes. LR favors content as the container; PB noted that in Roma, users fill in content via a form field, so that if we add a new element like constraint, Roma will need to be extended. Council agreed that action on this item needs to be deferred pending discussion with Sebastian. SR will create a formal proposal on Schematron rule placement.

Red Items

The only red item we discussed individually was “2002418: New element = clarification?” TMB feels this is an important item and would like us to move on it. TMB will contact Ellen Nessheim Wiger for additional background and examples, and will report back to Council.

DO asked about the status of red items; LB said that action on them will not be taken before the next release, but Council members are encouraged to think about them and add comments on SourceForge.

Document

PB has shared a document with proposed goals and strategy for a

document. Council members were requested to read over the document and to return comments to the Council list for incorporation into the minutes (see subsection below). Based on the feedback and offers of assistance, PB as editor-in-chief will convene a group of authors and editors who will begin dividing work and establishing timelines. We will aim to have a draft available by the time of the Members’ Meeting, and will distribute the draft via TEI-L for feedback from the community (with a request that they share the draft with new users of the TEI for response if possible).

ALL are asked to provide responses to PB’s outline on the tei-council list.

Formal Support for XML Schema Versions of Guidelines

DS explained that this item grew out of an observation on TEI-L from Romain Roure that the tei_all.xsd schema in the Guidelines release software is invalid. Sebastian responded that the problem involves more than a missing file called via inclusion but didn’t complete a diagnosis of the problem. In addition, DS noted that the W3C schemas generated by Roma for certain customizations (ones with multiple namespaces) cannot be fully downloaded because they comprise two or more .xsd files, while Roma offers only the single main file for download. DS and SR have discussed whether the TEI should continue to maintain formal support for W3C XML Schema versions of the Guidelines; if so, our tools for generating them must be fixed. DS and SR thought we might want to survey membership on schema usage, but consensus from Council was that we should first determine whether the bugs are easily fixable.

SR will be asked to report back on the severity of the problems.

Physical Bibliographies

This item has to do with the series of comments on TEI-PB from Murray McGillivray assessing the strengths and weaknesses of P5 for physical bibliography. LR proposes that someone from Council should review the discussion thread and report back on anything we need to take into account. As Physical Bibliography is a licensed workgroup, it is appropriate for us to appoint a Council liaison to work with them on proposals. PS was proposed, and agreed to take this role.

PS will review the messages on TEI-PB, confer with Dot Porter, and report back to Council.

Next Council Face-to-Face Meeting

At our Galway meeting, sentiment was expressed for having two Consortium-funded face-to-face Council working meetings per year. Earlier this summer, LR had suggested an early October meeting in Paris as the most economical and feasible possibility. However, discussion on this topic began with a caveat from DO that existing TEI funds most likely make a second funded meeting impossible. Costs for the Galway meeting came in somewhat over budget, and we also have the expense of printing physical copies of the P5 Guidelines. Funding a second face-to-face would use up Consortium reserves.

DS noted that, cost aside, it would be difficult for some Council members (those in North America in particular) to schedule long-distance travel in both October and November (for the Members’ Meeting). Consensus was that a physical meeting this October is not feasible, but we should make a formal proposal to the Board to permit two face-to-face Council meetings in 2009, probably one in February/March and a second around September.

LR and DO will make a concrete proposal to the Board for the addition of a second FTF meeting in 2009.

Next Teleconference

We will aim for at least two more teleconferences before the Members’ Meeting, one to agree on our priorities for tasks to complete before the meeting, and another to report back on implementation of the tasks and Guidelines fixes, along with a progress report on the

guide.