Re: TEI/TEI lite support

On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 09:25, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:
> 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.

Well, I'm now keen to add TEI to the list of XML formats that
Conglomerate will try to support.

> 
> > 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%

As I said, it doesn't usually matter if your dispspec contains more
elements than are in the DTD. You can have a dispspec that contains
simply the union of all possible elements.  The trouble is that at the
moment, each dispspec is only expected to associate with a single DTD. 
There isn't a mechanism yet for dealing with this kind of "family of
DTDs" approach.  We could use entities to reuse fragments of xds file
and have a big family of xds files, perhaps.

Need to think this through, and consider what to do with similar
approaches.  For example, this feels similar to the problem of when
someone wants to edit instances of a customised version of the DocBook
DTD.

Perhaps we should focus on TEI Lite for the moment?

> 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 :)

Please file an enhancement request in Bugzilla! (I'm serious)

> 
> > > 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).

I'm trying out your xds file; I'm ready to add it to CVS (which will put
it in tarballs).

Looks like Conglomerate didn't do a great job of generating the xds
file, but it's a start.  Some issues to look at:
- sort out the external-document-model element so that it knows about
the DTD
- fix the name and description in the metadata
- possibly remove the xml:lang attributes from the <name> elements
- possibly remove all the <name> elements, or fix them so they make
sense.
- use plugins where appropriate
- add icons
- etc

Let the list know when you've got a new xds file; I'm keen to add it.

Thanks!

Dave

> 
> > 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