Talk:Best Practices for TEI in Libraries

Some comments for TEI Header Guidelines

• You probably want to change the @id in a few places to @xml:id. And the examples have TEI.2 as the root. Piotr 22:48, 19 October 2008 (EDT)

Yes, at some point soon we will need to change

• id= to xml:id=
• <TEI.2> to <TEI xmlns=...>
• target="blah" to target="#blah"

passim. Will also need to ditch the bit on entities. Maybe I can get to these later today. — done.

We also need to figure out what to do about the recommendation for lang=. That's a tougher issue, because it's not just a syntax change. Our guildelines for best practice are at odds with the TEI Guidelines and the IETF best current practices. Syd 2008-10-21T19:09Z.

Referencing the P5 Guidelines

I think when ever possible, we should link to the P5 guidelines to further illustrate examples or even as additional reference to prose. These guidelines mention "text hierarchy" which is akin to structure of a text so we should link to Chapter 4, Default Text Structure for illustrations of the various forms, etc. Not only do we leverage existing, robust documentation, but we help all TEI users, novice or expert, "penetrate" the monolithic guidelines when relevant. Mdalmau

agreed. emcaulay

Issues Pending

General Recommendations section

Filenaming

{snippet from BPG text; comments about file naming} [This recommendation also seems dated (and the standard is targeted for CD-ROM file naming). I think we should recommend a consistency in file naming according to respective digital object storage practices. For example, IUDLP has guidelines in place and perhaps we can mine the more general recommendations from there like only ASCII, no spaces, 3 letter extensions, etc. (Mdalmau)] sounds like a good idea to remove or revise; as is it seems weird. (emcaulay) I'll just point out that people still use CD-ROM as an archival storage medium (I'm looking at you, Chris) as well as a file transfer mechanism [pwillettt] {end snippet}

File naming is still an issue. Perry pointed out that some folks store TEI files on CD-Rom (makes sense). Perhaps it just needs to be teased out for those who use CD-ROM for storage and more general filenmaing guidelines for server storage/delivery, like:

Standardized file naming for a particular encoding project is key for the reliable storage and delivery of these files online. Consider the following best practices when determining the file name scheme for your project:

• Each filename should contain an identifier that uniquely specifies a single digital object within the parent collection (e.g., a parent collection of text, images and other related materials)
• Each filename should be fully specified. It should not just be a sequence number that is dependent on location within a directory structure for context
• Filenames should not include spaces
• The first character of the filename should be an ASCII letter ('a' through 'z' or 'A' through 'Z') to comply with current restrictions on identifiers by many programming and metadata languages such as METS
• The "base" filename may include only ASCII letters ('a' through 'z' and 'A' through 'Z'), ASCII digits ('0' through '9'), hyphens, underscores, and periods.

Refrain from using other characters.

Additional file naming best practices to take into consideration include: a) case construct (all lowercase, camelCase, etc.), and b) avoid the use of multiple periods (most programming languages expect 1 period that separates the base from the file extension (xml, tiff, etc.).

For those saving files to CD-ROM for storage or file transfer, file naming should follow ISO 9660 conventions: 8-character filenames, 3-character extensions, using A-Z, a-z, 0-9, underscores and hyphens.