Re: error in description of teiCorpus

Fine with me; I hold no brief for my proposed wording, which I gather
is based on a misunderstanding of what a series of facsimile, fsdDecl,
sourceDoc, and text elements appearing as children of teiCorpus are
intended to be.  I’ll leave the task of formulating wording to those
who understand the intent, which despite Lou’s explanation I don’t.
Examples might help.

This may be a bigger problem than I realized at first.

Right now the function of fsdDecl, facsimile, sourceDoc, and text as
children of teiCorpus appears to be undocumented except in the
feature request to which Lou points; the descriptions of teiCorpus
(and language corpora in general) in chapters 15 and 4 of the
Guidelines say nothing about them, except to describe the teiCorpus
element as one teiHeader element followed by a series of ‘TEI’
elements, which entails that those elements are invalid as
children of teiCorpus.

It looks as if what was discussed and approved and implemented
was not a complete self-contained proposal that changes the 
Guidelines from one self-consistent state to another self-consistent 
state, but a proposal that entails an unspecified number of knock-on 
changes to be worked out later: a promissory note with neither
amount nor due date filled in.

Perhaps those responsible for the maintenance and development of the
Guidelines should do as some standards development groups do, and
require that change proposals not introduce new contradictions into
the spec.  At a minimum, that means that if the change proposal calls
for changing the content model of an element, it also calls for
wording changes to every description of the element which reflects the
old content model but contradicts the new one.  Such a requirement has
the drawback of making it harder to prepare change proposals, and it
would make the process feel heavier and slower.  That's probably a
drawback.

But given that an interested user cannot now find out what a
/teiCorpus/facsimile element is supposed to mean or be, how much good
was achieved by the change to the content model?  Presumably those who
proposed the change are now able to use it while making their corpora
valid according to a vanilla TEI schema.  But since it's not possible
for a consumer of those corpora to find out what some things mean, we
seem to have lost one of the key promises to consumers of TEI-encoded
texts, which is that in any TEI-conforming document the meaning of the
markup language must be documented: either in the Guidelines, for
TEI-defined elements, or in the ODD file, for extensions and
modifications.


Good luck,

Michael

> On Feb 15, 2017, at 10:03 AM, Lou Burnard <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> It's true that the description doesn't match the content model now permitted, but I am not sure that I like your proposed rewording, since "one or more elements representing part of the corpus" seems to contradict the use case which led to Council agreeing this change back in 2013 (see https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/456/). My reading of that discussion is that any model.resourceLike element which is a direct child of teiCorpus should represent the whole of (some aspect of) the corpus, which is not quite what the suggested phrase connotes.
> 
> On 15/02/17 16:26, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>> The gloss of the teiCorpus element reads
>> 
>>     <teiCorpus> contains the whole of a TEI encoded corpus,
>>     comprising a single corpus header and one or more TEI
>>     elements, each containing a single text header and a text.
>> 
>> This was a true description in TEI P3 and TEI P4, but at
>> some point the content model was changed.  What follows
>> the header is no longer a sequence of ‘TEI’ elements
>> (and since the vocabulary can be modified, it is also not
>> necessarily a sequence of elements defined by the TEI,
>> so not necessarily ‘TEI elements’ in that sense).
>> 
>> The gloss should probably be changed to avoid stating
>> a falsehood.  Perhaps it would do just to say
>> 
>>     <teiCorpus> contains the whole of a TEI encoded corpus,
>>     comprising a single corpus header and one or more
>>     elements representing part of the corpus, some of
>>     which may be teiCorpus or TEI elements with headers
>>     of their own.
>> 
>> 
>> ********************************************
>> C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
>> Black Mesa Technologies LLC
>> [email protected]
>> http://www.blackmesatech.com
>> ********************************************

********************************************
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
[email protected]
http://www.blackmesatech.com
********************************************