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Re: How to render TEI <div*>s with chapter-like pagin

Subject: Re: How to render TEI <div*>s with chapter-like pagination?
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 13:33:59 -0400
shared stylesheets
James,

At 08:49 PM 4/10/2003, you wrote:
I *could* do that, but I'm trying to engage in some
"vicarious laziness," trying to make "fixes" to the
stylesheets good enough to be sent upstream.
Obviously, I've got a lot to learn before I can do
that.

:-> Sebastian's no dummy: I bet he's got all the low-hanging fruit and problems that remain are ... problematic.


The TEI (P3 published in 1994) wasn't designed with XSLT in mind. Nor should it be. (Again, particular profiles may be, but that's a different matter.)

I have sometimes expressed a concern about the "gravitational pull" exerted by particular shared processing applications on tagging practice within a community. Such as an XSL stylesheet suite -- and the better it is designed, the worse becomes the problem. For example, I believe shared stylesheets have had some deleterious effects on EAD (Encoded Archival Description), despite the good intentions of their promulgators. Not knowing any better, projects tend to code to the stylesheet (the way newbie web designers code to a particular browser), not to the information they are tagging, with the result that information reuse and repurposing -- that is, any application but that particular stylesheet's target -- are compromised, and much of the promise of XML tagging in the first place is betrayed. (The XML becomes a handmaiden of the output format, rather than the output format serving the data.) Interestingly, it is (in part) precisely because TEI is so large and loose (so stylesheets tend to be tuned to instances or profiles, rather than claiming to do the whole shebang) that the effect of shared stylesheets on TEI practice has been less insidious.

Note this is *not* to say that sharing stylesheets is a bad idea. On the contrary, the more *different* stylesheets and applications are shared, the less the danger of convergence on a monolithic process-as-orthodoxy with its particular tradeoffs.

But this is all meta-commentary, maybe better for another list.

Cheers,
Wendell

___&&__&_&___&_&__&&&__&_&__&__&&____&&_&___&__&_&&_____&__&__&&_____&_&&_
    "Thus I make my own use of the telegraph, without consulting
     the directors, like the sparrows, which I perceive use it
     extensively for a perch." -- Thoreau


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