The TEI is dead
Long live the TEI
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Pisa, 16 November 2001
1. Overview
- Some TEI accomplishments
- Some challenges for the Consortium
2. Some things we did right
- 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*
3. What to do better now
- political program?
- technical program?
4. Political / organizational
(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
5. Hopes
- retain globalist / universalist aims
- retain and expand international base
- wider adoption and awareness
6. Technical program
Always and foremost: maintaining and
improving the tag sets.
Some overarching challenges:
- extensibility
- modularity
- integration with practice
7. Extensibility
The key: partial understanding.
The closed-world hypothesis: just say No.
Knowing how to extend in advance.
(How will we know what we think
until we see what we do?)
8. Extensibility
Consider a precedent:
- HTML's extensibility rule.
- Two kinds of extension
- ignore the tags
- ignore the elements
but only one kind of support.
- This cup is half full.
Bottom line: err boldly.
9. Modularity
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
10. Modularity how?
- 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
11. Namespaces: half empty
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.
12. Namespaces: half full
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.
13. Namespaces: some issues
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.
14. Namespaces: some issues
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?
15. Integration of theory and practice I
Integrate and cohabit with work done elsewhere:
- Unicode
- XPath
- XML Schema, Relax NG, ...
16. Unicode
- TEI agnosticism and skepticism
- Unicode one-way-our-way approach
- non-standard characters
- the private-use area
- transliterations
17. XPath and EPN
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?
18. XPointer -- issues
- simplicity
- expressive power
- interoperability
- semantic consistency (intertranslatability)
- syntactic consistency (interoperability)
Wait and see?
Alternate EPN and XPointer tag sets?
19. Schema languages
There are lots and lots of XML schema languages:
- Sox, Biztalk (XML Data Reduced), DDML, DSD, ...
- Relax, Trex, Relax NG
- XML Schema (W3C)
20. Other markup languages
Integrate and cohabit with work done elsewhere:
- MathML
- parts of XHTML
- SVG
- SMIL?
- CALS/SGML Open/Oasis tables, HTML tables, ...
21. Theory and practice II
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.
22. Long live the TEI
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 ...
23. Long live the TEI
- 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.