Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?

Obsolete would be better than deprecated. But ideally there would be 
something analogous to deprecation during which you warn users that 
you're intending to stop maintaining a particular feature or conversion, 
and specify a date at which it will be retired.

Cheers,
Martin

On 2017-01-10 07:10 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
> It's not strictly speaking deprecated though, is it? Otherwise it
> couldn't be considered useful ... quite the reverse in fact! It's just
> unsupported, or non strategic or minority interest, or something.
>
>
>
>
> Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Tab®|PRO
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Martin Holmes
> Date:2017/01/10 13:44 (GMT+00:00)
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Cocoa texts and conversions?
>
> Hi James,
>
> You're right that we have no mechanisms for deprecation in the
> Stylesheets. But we could simply move deprecated code to the TEI wiki,
> where there is already a collection of useful XSLT:
>
> <http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Category:XSLT>
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> On 2017-01-10 05:07 AM, James Cummings wrote:
>> Hi Piotr,
>>
>> That is partly why I suggested it should be assigned to me (since I know
>> the original code).  I agree that Council has *more* than enough work
>> keeping up with maintenance of the Guidelines, as well as the
>> Stylesheets and other software. This would be very low priority and if I
>> didn't have time to do it in the next couple releases I'd note as much
>> on the issue, and either I or someone could remove the cocoa-to-xsl
>> scripts.  Though I'm curious what should be done when we do so..
>> previously we've just moved things around as and when we please or got
>> rid of stylesheets , and that is good, but it might be beneficial to
>> leave a note as to where these scripts could be found. (i.e. I might
>> fork just the cocoa-to-xsl and stick it in my repositories in case it is
>> useful to anyone, including me, in the future.) But then do we have to
>> maintain that pointer? Maybe best just to delete and leave the existence
>> of the closed issue on github as documentation. ;-)
>>
>> But honest, I'll give it a good 20 minutes of thought in trying to fix
>> it --  if I can't in that time, then maybe we'll get rid of it.
>>
>> -James
>>
>>
>> On 10/01/17 12:26, Piotr Banski wrote:
>>> Hi James,
>>>
>>> I think the only good (or at least acceptable) argument is in your
>>> last line (plus your request to get this assigned):
>>>
>>> > since it used to work I'm suspecting that making its output valid
>>> again wouldn't necessarily be too difficult
>>>
>>> -- otherwise, I can't see why the Council should devote any time to
>>> up-conversion from COCOA or any legacy format. This should always,
>>> IMO, be an issue for a local project (formal or informal: funded or
>>> performed as e.g. a semester assignment or on a friend-to-friend
>>> basis). I feel scared by the prospect that Council time (including F2F
>>> time) might get allocated to such matters, seeing the flood of
>>> _current_ issues at GitHub.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>>   Piotr
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 01/09/2017 12:57 PM, James Cummings wrote:
>>>> Hi Martin,
>>>>
>>>> Apologies for the delay in answering.  In case anyone is interested
>>>> in their history: Yes, that initial cocoa-to-xsl script was indeed
>>>> written by me (and then improved substantially into doing multiple
>>>> passes by Sebastian with additional debugging output).  My first
>>>> attempts at doing so were to make the Cocoa file well-formed XML
>>>> (through wrapping a root element around it, changing any individual
>>>> tags to be milestone-like psuedo elements) which was done in Perl
>>>> before using XSLT, and then running that through two stylesheets, one
>>>> to transform the flat cocoa markup language to a flattened TEI markup
>>>> language (i.e. rename things) and then the next to fill that
>>>> flattened TEI with structure (using xsl:for-each-group).  The
>>>> original files were written in 2004, with the express purpose of
>>>> being used for a subset of the OTA consisting specifically of verse
>>>> drama and I even spoke about this at ALLC-ACH 2004 in Gothenburg. The
>>>> are available for now at
>>>> http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jamesc/research/cocoa2tei/ where I put them in
>>>> early 2006. I was doing this in a very modular way with the intent of
>>>> applying to different sorts of texts as well. Partly this was created
>>>> to estimate for a (failed) funding bid by the OTA how much work it
>>>> would take to convert a large portion of the OTA archives all to TEI
>>>> (whilst maintaining the original files of course).  [If I remember
>>>> the reviews correctly it failed partly because one reviewer was
>>>> outraged that mere technicians might *change* the files lovingly
>>>> crafted by academics, even though the bid clearly spelled out that
>>>> this was only format conversion and that the original files would
>>>> also remain available.  Ah well.] In 2010 as part of a business as
>>>> usual drive to migrate some of the OTA texts into TEI P5, my email
>>>> archive shows that Sebastian started working on a new cocoa-to-tei
>>>> conversion and took my XSLT as the starting point and added the regex
>>>> and an extra passes to do it all in a single XSLT while also making
>>>> it a bit more general.  I contributed some bits and pieces.  That is
>>>> probably why it isn't as generalised as it could be.  But I think it
>>>> serves better as an example than a generalised conversion.
>>>>
>>>> Although the OTA is now in the Bodleian Libraries, not here at IT
>>>> Services, I doubt it will ever get rid of its Cocoa texts (even if it
>>>> provides migrated versions of them). While it may be easier to just
>>>> get rid of the conversion I would certainly be willing to give it a
>>>> go in trying to fix it. (i.e. If you've made a github issue, feel
>>>> free to assign to me.) As to why we should have and maintain legacy
>>>> conversions like this, I would say that it is as an example for those
>>>> approaching similar migration up-conversions.  I'm not saying that is
>>>> a very good reason, but since it used to work I'm suspecting that
>>>> making its output valid again wouldn't necessarily be too difficult.
>>>>
>>>> -James
>>>>
>>>> On 07/01/17 18:40, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>>>> What I'm actually trying to do is understand the situation better,
>>>>> and I'm getting there. This is what I think we've learned:
>>>>>
>>>>>  - Cocoa is not very amenable to a generic conversion process, since
>>>>> its syntax and usage is extremely variable;
>>>>>
>>>>>  - Our current Cocoa conversion script (James will hopefully confirm
>>>>> or refute this) was written specifically to convert certain OTA
>>>>> texts, and could not be applied generically;
>>>>>
>>>>>  - In any case, that script is broken (it produces invalid TEI);
>>>>>
>>>>>  - There is a possible way forward in writing a conversion that
>>>>> creates milestone elements, as suggested by Lou, but that would
>>>>> still depend on knowledge of the actual syntax and special
>>>>> characters used in any specific set of texts;
>>>>>
>>>>>  - There are still some Cocoa texts out there which have not yet
>>>>> been converted to TEI.
>>>>>
>>>>> What I take from this is that it would probably make more sense to
>>>>> work with those people such as Elizabeth who have Cocoa texts that
>>>>> matter, and get those converted to TEI; meanwhile we could retire
>>>>> the conversion that doesn't work, and remove it from the Stylesheets
>>>>> repo. This is obviously a question for Council, though.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>> Martin
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> cheers
>>>>>> stuart
>>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>