Re: TEI/TEI lite support

Il sab, 2004-01-31 alle 20:07, Dave Malcolm ha scritto:
> In theory, perhaps we could have multiple xds files, one for each DTD,
> with some kind of entity referencing thing going on to reuse the common
> features.
> 
> (I really need to take a good look at TEI before commenting further I
> think - looks like it'd be a nice format to add, and wouldn't be too
> hard, I think.  Assuming that the format is "free", and that we don't
> have to pay licensing fees or similar...)

No fees at all, it's a free format. And yes, it would be nice to have it
supported by something better (= more user friendly) than emacs ;) The
academic community is just now waking up to the opportunities offered by
Linux.

> OK - I just had a look through the DTD structure of TEI and now I'm
> scared!

See what I mean? :)

> Lots of fragments of DTD information in multiple files.  The
> good thing is that Conglomerate xds files are quite "sloppy", and it
> doesn't really matter if you have elements missing, or extra elements.
> 
> It might even be worth redesigning how Conglomerate's xds files are
> structured to make it easier to handle TEI...

Keep in mind, though, that usually you don't use the *whole* TEI stuff:
you either specify the parts you need (e.g. TEI.prose and TEI.textcrit
if you're dealing with a prose text and adding a critical apparatus to
it) and go ahead, OR you cook a custom dtd (called "TEI view") which
includes only the elements from the sections you need plus your possible
modifications (you can rename elements, f.i.). TEI Lite is an example of
a possible TEI view with all the most commonly used elements.

So producing an xds file with *all* of possible TEI elements, while
surely worthwhile, would probably be a tedious task AND overkill for 99%
of the users. It would make sense try to mimic the TEI mechanism and
manage to "merge" several xds as needed, I wonder if that would be
possible. It would also be nice to have some sort of GUI tool to edit
Display Specs, with property windows, drag'n'drop and the like, but I'll
stop dreaming now :)

> > I managed to load the teixlite.dtd, though, and save a display
> > specification for Conglomerate. Same for the Digital Scriptorium dtd,
> > which is based on a single dtd file very similar to the TEI Lite one. 
> > I still haven't had the time to refine the resulting .xds files, if you
> > (Walter, I mean :) are interested we can work together on it,
> > subdividing work and checking each other's files.
> 
> Please can you post your xds files to this list!  It'd be good to add
> them to CVS, and into the tarballs.  That way we can have TEI support
> for everyone, from install.  Whenever you find an element that isn't
> supported, just add it to the xds file and post a patch to the list.

I'm going to add it to the bug entry, unless you want it on the list.
Bit please don't use it yet for the tarballs, I'd like to fine tune it a
bit (at the moment it's just the dtd dump).

> This would probably be a single "tei.xds" file, or maybe a "tei.xds.in"
> file so that we can support translations of the element names.
> 
> Are there any sample instance documents that we could freely
> redistribute in the "examples" subfolder?  This is much nicer from a
> testing point-of-view.

I believe there are some on the TEI site. If not I can try to find
something appropriate.

BTW, TEI dtds and stylesheet are available as RPM packets on Mandrake
Linux contrib repositories.

Ciao

-- 
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      roberto.rossellidelturco at unito.it
Dipartimento di Scienze         rosselli at ling.unipi.it
del Linguaggio                  Then spoke the thunder  DA
Universita' di Torino           Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)
 
  Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
  mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)