
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Lee Passey <lee@passkeysoft.com> wrote:
So, the basic requirement is that whatever standard is selected, it should be possible to losslessly convert from the standard to TEI and back again, and likewise convert losslessly from any TEI file to the agreed-upon standard and back to TEI. Any markup scheme which can meet this requirement is a candidate.
It's virtually never true that between two formats that they can meaningfully be losslessly converted between each other. In the smaller, more defined realm of images: JPEG and PNG can be reasonably losslessly converted to TIFF files, and the results converted back (if you know the conventions used in the original conversion), but general TIFF files can't be losslessly converted to JPEG or PNG. GIF can be converted to APNG (but not standard PNG) and back, but in general APNG can't be converted to GIF. You can't perfectly convert plain text back and forth to TEI; you're forced either to keep your tables as monospaced or accept that they're going to lose their hand-set qualities along the way, for example. I'm pretty sure converting a modern HTML website to TEI and back won't come out anywhere near losslessly*. You can't really convert TEI to XHTML and back; with conventions perhaps, but I think it'd be a point of storing TEI in XHTML comments and names as much as actually converting the TEI to XHTML. Basically, that sentence to me means that TEI is a candidate, and nothing else. There are no interesting formats that are isomorphic to TEI; all formats have chosen to handle certain features in a distinct way, don't include some features that TEI does, and often include some features that TEI doesn't. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.