Joshua Hutchinson wrote:
Hmm... Maybe I misunderstand here. If a file comes in, marked up in TEI-Lite and we cannot transform it with our standard process, it seems to me either the DTD we've chosen is incomplete or the TEI markup has a bug.
Consider following examples. A DTD-based validator can catch this: <address> <date>01 Jan 2004</date> </address> because a date has no business inside an address. But not this: <address> <name>Chicago</name> <street>2830 North Clark</street> <place>Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon</place> </address> The validator cannot know that the markup is all wrong. Of course this will _transform_ all right.
Now, if a new text needs a feature not in our current DTD (am I using the teminology right here), I'm not against modifying the DTD standard to include it, but there would need to be some procedure to do it so that it gets "reviewed" by others first.
TEI has a well documented interface for exactly this purpose. Experience has shown that not even the full TEI can accomodate all cases. So, if you need to mark up something completely new, as eg. the message you just got from an alien civilization, you can expand the TEI DTD and still conform to the TEI standard.
Or, maybe there is a way to define new elements that are outside the standard DTD within the XML submission file itself? Again, I'm trying to learn this as I go, so if my question is stupid, I apologize in advance.
No. All you can define inside an XML file is the DTD (or other schema) you want to use and entities like &myentity; Of course you can use a DTD that defines some stuff and then includes the standard TEI DTD. But, as said above, there is a better way to do that in TEI.
If we have the tools on the server and available for use, that is sufficient for me. But I also think that all the files (DTD, XSLT, and whatever else) should always be available for download for the industrious person that DOES want to run it on their own machine.
Already done. Start here: http://www.gutenberg.org/tei/ -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org