- 1. Overview
- 2. Some things we did right
- 3. What to do better now
- 4. Political / organizational
- 5. Hopes
- 6. Technical program
- 7. Extensibility
- 8. Extensibility
- 9. Modularity
- 10. Modularity how?
- 11. Namespaces: half empty
- 12. Namespaces: half full
- 13. Namespaces: some issues
- 14. Namespaces: some issues
- 15. Integration of theory and practice I
- 16. Unicode
- 17. XPath and EPN
- 18. XPointer -- issues
- 19. Schema languages
- 20. Other markup languages
- 21. Theory and practice II
- 22. Long live the TEI
- 23. Long live the TEI
Overview |    1 of 23 |
- Some TEI accomplishments
- Some challenges for the Consortium
Some things we did right | 2 of 23 |
- the TEI interchange format (→ XML)
- the TEI extended pointer syntax (good 80/20 point; → XPointer, XPath)
- TEI linking (→ XLink)
- the pizza model
- DTDs are not written but generated
- work to earn community buy-in*
What to do better now | 3 of 23 |
- political program?
- technical program?
Political / organizational | 4 of 23 |
(Why are you listening to me?)
- Avoiding stagnation.
- Does 'worse is better' apply to scholarly tools?
- Delicate balance:
- the long view (the Tower)
- the short view (Netscape)
- Jefferson on revolutions
Hopes | 5 of 23 |
- retain globalist / universalist aims
- retain and expand international base
- wider adoption and awareness
Technical program | 6 of 23 |
Always and foremost: maintaining and
improving the tag sets.
Some overarching challenges:
- extensibility
- modularity
- integration with practice
Extensibility | 7 of 23 |
- The key: partial understanding.
- The closed-world hypothesis: just say No.
- Knowing how to extend in advance.
Extensibility | 8 of 23 |
Consider a precedent:
- HTML's extensibility rule.
- Two kinds of extension
- ignore the tags
- ignore the elements
- This cup is half full.
Bottom line: err boldly.
Modularity | 9 of 23 |
TEI pioneered modularity in DTDs: Pizza model.
We can do even better:
- make the pizza model generically usable (Chinese menu!)
- integrate better the work done elsewhere
- MathML, SVG, etc.
- CALS or HTML tables
- Docbook
- easier extension of TEI
Modularity how? | 10 of 23 |
- define a namespace* -- or several
- use XML Schema to define schema modules
- generate namespace-qualified DTDs
- publication units?
Consequences:
- cleaner definition of extension
- easier for developers to recognize and support standard TEI
- easier to support single tag sets
Namespaces: half empty | 11 of 23 |
The W3C Namespaces Recommendation does a lot less
than meets the eye.
- no magic (or non-magic) information about meaning
- no universally unique names
- no information about markup vocabularies or document types
This glass is mostly empty.
Namespaces: half full | 12 of 23 |
The W3C Namespaces Recommendation does
just one thing:
- It defines one* way to tell your stuff from everybody else's stuff.
Little things can go a long way.
Namespaces: some issues | 13 of 23 |
Namespace names are uniform resource identifiers (URIs). E.g.
http://www.tei-c.org/ns/teip4.
What goes at that URL?
Namespace mechanism supports direct reuse.
Namespaces: some issues | 14 of 23 |
Namespace names are uniform resource identifiers (URIs). E.g.
http://www.tei-c.org/ns/teip4.
What goes at that URL?
Namespace mechanism supports direct reuse.
It does not support naturalization
of predefined semantics.
Revive architectural forms?
Integration of theory and practice I | 15 of 23 |
Integrate and cohabit with work done elsewhere:
- Unicode
- XPath
- XML Schema, Relax NG, ...
Unicode | 16 of 23 |
- TEI agnosticism and skepticism
- Unicode one-way-our-way approach
- non-standard characters
- the private-use area
- transliterations
XPath and EPN | 17 of 23 |
The TEI Extended Pointer Notation
- implemented, but not really widely
- numerous newer specs, interrelated:
- XPointer
- XSLT
- XPath
- various subsets of XPath (XSLT match, XML Schema, XForms, ...)
- What is to be done?
XPointer -- issues | 18 of 23 |
- simplicity
- expressive power
- interoperability
- semantic consistency (intertranslatability)
- syntactic consistency (interoperability)
Alternate EPN and XPointer tag sets?
Schema languages | 19 of 23 |
There are lots and lots of XML schema languages:
- Sox, Biztalk (XML Data Reduced), DDML, DSD, ...
- Relax, Trex, Relax NG
- XML Schema (W3C)
Other markup languages | 20 of 23 |
Integrate and cohabit with work done elsewhere:
- MathML
- parts of XHTML
- SVG
- SMIL?
- CALS/SGML Open/Oasis tables, HTML tables, ...
Theory and practice II | 21 of 23 |
The community needs continuing work on `markup theory':
- Thesis: markup represents an interpretation of the text
- perfect markup is thus markup which perfectly captures our theory of the text;
- a perfect markup language captures our theory of what is possible in texts.
Long live the TEI | 22 of 23 |
The value of the TEI lies not any particular organizational form,
nor even in a particular SGML or XML DTD,
but in its role as an expression
of our will to ensure ...
Long live the TEI | 23 of 23 |
- that the resources we create are reusable, because not tied exclusively to a particular application
- that we work cooperatively to produce shared semantics for as broad and deep a universe of texts as possible
- ... for behold, if they speak a single language, nothing they wish to do will be impossible for them.