Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Lee Passey wrote:
The principal work in creating the style sheet was in determining which TEI tags suggested a block presentation, which tags suggested an inline presentation,
TEI does not specify this, and many tags are 'ambivalent' about whether they do represent a block or not. The examples in the TEI specs often use the same tag in a different manner. Most of the time you just have to decide from context, ie. a <figure> inside a <p> is inline, a <figure> insid a <div> is block.
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. Your comment about <figure>s is helpful, however. In the next iteration of pgtei.css I'll change the definition so that figures inside of paragraphs are rendered as inline, and all other figures are rendered as block.
TEI has two tags for quotations, one apparently for long quotations (<quote>) and one apparently for short quotations, (<q>). I opted to treat <quote> as block-level tags (similar to the HTML <blockquote>) and <q> as inline (similar to the HTML <q>).
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.
Also TEI defines a semantical difference between <q> and <quote>. <q> is for direct speech and <quote> is for citation of sources.
A prime example. Looking at the TEI spec, I think you are probably right, although the academese of the spec leaves some doubt in my mind. ("<quote> contains a phrase or passage attributed by the narrator or author to some agency external to the text."?? What the heck does _that_ mean?) Previously, my curiousity having gotten the better of me, I went out to the TEI Listserve archives and looked at the threads on "floating divs." In those cases where the petitioner was looking for a way to indicate a distinct block of text inside a paragraph, the recommendation was almost always to use the <quote> tag, even in those cases where the 'quotedness' of the block was fairly tenuous. I would venture to say that after <p>, <quote> is probably the next most abused tag in TEI. 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.
While Mr. Perathoner's version of _Alice_ has a fairly complete <teiHeader> section, it did not have a title page;
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 set <teiHeader> to "display:none", and added a <titlePage> to the file. I also fixed a small number of abuses of the <p> tag, and changed the tag for block-style quotations from <q> to <quote>. The resulting file can be found at http://www.passkeysoft.com/~lee/alice.xml.
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.