Preliminary punchlist for Schema revisions (post 1/1 release)

See also the IssuesSuggestions page. Decide on those and roll them in here. (Then delete that page?)

Throughout these discussions, "schemas" is taken to include both the schemas available in the RNG library (DHQauthor, DHQpublish, independent headers), plus additional rules (both "hard" and "soft") to be formalized and enforced through Schematron assertion sets.

Under consideration:

Please add your thoughts (adding new sections if needed).

TEI-friendly name changes

• xtext to become floating-text
• q to become said
• mediaObject to become binaryObject?
• =graphic/@alt-url is an un-TEI-like name; shouldn't it be @altUrl? (Actually all names should be reviewed for consistency in format)

Bibliographical citations

We are currently considering ways to enhance the functionality of bibliographical handling.

The current expectation is that we will begin to collect a union catalog of works cited in DHQ articles, and to maintain this list going forward.

This will both give us a way both to manage bibliographic format centrally, and to develop more elaborate functionalities for our bibliographies over time.

In combination with this, we are also examining ways of providing bibliographic entries (bibl elements) with typing information, so as to facilitate both validation (using Schematron) and semi-automated formatting.

There are several related developments will support these efforts:

1. Identifying types. The list must be short and sweet, but accommodate for the commonest sorts of bibliographical items. Certainly: 'journalArticle' and 'monograph'. Perhaps: 'bookChapter', 'webResource'. Others?
2. Formalizing validation and formatting requirements for these types.
3. Building tools for coordinating bibliographies with the central bibliography. (Among other things, this means some way of establishing or tracking whether any given pair of entries in different articles are "the same".) This is "blue sky", but the sooner we have reasonable ideas about it the less retrospective conversion we'll have to do.

Inclusions and exclusions?

SGML offered inclusions and exclusions, ways of saying (for example) "do not allow notes inside notes".

While Relax NG validation can't do this, Schematron validation can, so we might consider whether any rules of this type would be useful (and at what validation stage).

This concerns both preventing nesting of elements like notes or bibls, and inline elements (called inside called?).

Supporting enhanced and 'smart' formatting

Some special formatting requirements may require extra support in the DHQpublish layer.

In particular, elements whose rendition 'toggles' or 'nests' such as emph (which toggles between italics and roman in display) and called (which requires either single or double quotes depending on ancestry).

To an extent, these display requirements can be addressed transparently in XSLT.

We may find that we also need an escape hatch, however, such as a @rend attribute that would hard-code the rendition in special cases. It makes sense that this control should be under editorial but not authorial control?

Minor fixes

• cit is not currently permitted in note unless it is the only child; probably note should permit cit to be included in running prose. (jf: I can't duplicate this bug. Could it have been O2 checking against a "learned" document structure and not the schema? in any case, I need more info to duplicate it. -wap)

• think further about how to handle graphics; when and where should graphic be permitted outside of figure?

• fix reference documentation of ptr to correct the description of @loc.

• remove @type from div until we are prepared to supply a value list and act on it.

• add "underlined" as a value of rend= on

-- WendellPiez - 16 Jun 2008