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
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"Thus I make my own use of the telegraph, without consulting
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extensively for a perch." -- Thoreau
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