Lee Passey wrote:
Yes, one of the drawbacks of TEI is its ambiguity, and this problem comes into play as much in XSL Transformations as in Cascading Style Sheets. I think the holy grail of markup is to be able to perform all sorts of transformations, including transformation for presentation purposes, without human intervention. It appears that TEI has not yet solved this problem.
It wasn't designed for presentation at all. It was designed to make old documents accessible electronically to the scholar. They don't care much about fonts and point sizes, but very much about semantics.
This is quite a departure from TEI philosphy, which requires that all presentational attributes be segregated into the rend attribute.
A rule which is more often stated than observed.
I have heard this assertion more often than I have seen it proved.
On the other hand, if people would be willing to consistently use <q type="block"> or <q rend="block"> for block quotes, that would be fine too. (I personally think 'type="block"' is preferable, as I see block quotes has having significance beyond merely the way they are rendered). If TEI is to become useful as a master format for PG, it will require a consistent usage to reduce or eliminate ambiguity, beyond that which is required by the TEI spec itself.
Running in a quote or displaying it is a purly presentational matter. As for the presentational stuff in the rend attribute, it now follows the CSS2 specs. So that ambiguity source has been eliminated.
It does not need a title page. A title page can easily be generated from the data in <teiHeader>.
I'm not yet proficient enough with CSS to be able to do this, but if you could show be how I would appreciate it.
I know how to do it in XSL. I don't know how to do it in CSS.
This very much confirms my assertion that you have to tweak the TEI source not indifferently if you want to make it work with CSS.
I disagree. I believe that if the appropriate discipline is practiced at the time the TEI source is created it can work for both CSS and XSLT, and I believe the new version of _Alice_ demonstrates that. That the file needed to be modified only demonstrates that at the time of its creation the required discipline was not practiced.
`Discipline' in this case is to nudge the encoder into using only those TEI constructs that will work with CSS and forbidding him to use all those TEI constructs that don't work with CCS. None of the things you `fixed' were violating the TEI spec. You just had to `fix' them because CSS is too weak to support them. eg. You had to move the entity decarations into an internal subset because browsers don't support external subsets yet. But nothing in the TEI spec requires internal subsets. Actually internal subsets just take up more space in the files and are much harder to maintain. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org