TEIWiki:IdleTalk

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Hello

This is an attempt to create a forum for general discussion on topics relevant to this wiki. Something to replace repeated entries in multiple users' discussions. For now, it is just, it seems, James and Kevin who can be counted on to discuss matters on a regular basis, but we do want to attract more people here, don't we. If we can persuade even a fraction of the community behind TEI-L to visit this place and edit here, things will definitely start rolling faster. And the larger the wiki, the more people it will attract, and so on. And once the powers-that-be notice that it is useful, perhaps they will even consider a software upgrade :-), which will stop the automated spam and make editing easier by removing some of the annoying bugs (more on that later).

Aha, I admit I didn't think long about the name of this page, so it's happily open to modification. I intended it to be something like <idleTalk>, but the software may have a problem with the < sign, and linking to it might be problematic, too. I'll try to hook it up to the sidebar in a moment, hoping it's ok with everyone.

So let's see how this works and if it works at all. Piotr 11:37, 25 September 2007 (BST)

response

Kshawkin: I've mentioned upgrading MediaWiki to James and later to Chris Ruotolo. Chris told me it will have to wait till after P5 1.0 -- that is, until at least November 2007.

A different main page layout?

Was thinking of making the main page slightly more attractive, but I haven't come far: see User:Piotr Banski/sandbox (and possibly the history of that page) for some attempts. Everyone's invited to modify it, I'm not really good at such things. (You don't have to worry about spoiling things, it's just a copy of the main page in my user space.) Thanks, Piotr 11:47, 25 September 2007 (BST)

• Since this is a wiki, I just went ahead and put in a new version. Tried to make it a bit less dry and provide a bit more explanation for where links lead. Won't have any problem with a revert, the old version is just a click away. Piotr 20:40, 26 September 2007 (BST)

Categories

Tried to make some sense of them (and for them). I'm a bit uneasy about the following categories and articles, and will be grateful if someone can verify both their purpose and my handling of them:

• Category:Interfaces, Category:Extension -- are they duplicates of some subcategory of Tools and Customization, respectively?
• XML Versioning -- it would be great to have some more info on what this is about :-) Schema versioning, perhaps?
• BBEdit -- an article to be expanded and perhaps recategorised
• Category:CSS, Category:XQuery and Category:XSLT mention an address for stylesheet submission. I'm just wondering if it still works and if someone checks it. Maybe it would be easier (and definitely less time-consuming) to just ask for direct submissions into TEI Wiki (?) Piotr 13:52, 25 September 2007 (BST) Solved: stylesheets@tei-c.org: host jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU[128.143.22.122] said: 550 stylesheets@tei-c.org: User unknown in virtual alias table (in reply to RCPT TO command). Removed the address from these three categories. Piotr 00:19, 26 September 2007 (BST)
• Put Category:XQuery and Category:XSLT into Category:Tools, as they partly fulfilled the criteria (articles on XQuery and XSLT have been in that category for a while), though it felt a bit wrong, like shifting from a narrow understanding of tools as software to broad understanding of tools as including specs/languages that make your job easier. By the same token, I should treat Category:CSS alike. They just don't feel right as root categories, but "Tools" does not feel right as the sole containing category, either, it seems to me. Piotr 22:19, 25 September 2007 (BST) Still rather unhappy about that, see below.

Response

Kshawkin 14:13, 25 September 2007 (BST): Category:Interfaces does seem to be a subcategory. I've modified it to make it so. Category:Extension appears unrelated to the tools section of the wiki.

• Category:Extension seems to duplicate Category:Customization but may have been intended as its subcategory (it mentions detailed customizations as opposed to attribute-less customizations mentioned in Category:Customization). Perhaps it was meant as a holder for special customizations to DTDs ("DTD extensions"), the way it was done up to P4? Let me nest it within "Customization" and see what happens. It definitely deserves a bit more explanation for its purpose to become clear (and/or possibly it needs to be renamed to mention DTDs directly). Piotr 21:40, 25 September 2007 (BST)

  There may have been a misunderstanding behind Syd's modification of James's original description of the category. Went back to James's version, hoping I got it right. Piotr 21:49, 25 September 2007 (BST)

Category trees

This is what the category situation looks like right now. I'm not saying this is perfect, mind you :-) Posting this info here hoping for comments and ideas for improvement. Piotr 22:50, 25 September 2007 (BST)

• 5 root categories:
  1. Community (TEI-community-related)
  2. Customization (pieces of ODDs)
  3. Markup (mostly descriptive)
  4. TEI Wiki (in the TEIWiki and Help namespaces; internal docs)
  5. Tools (understood broadly and including CSS, XQuery, and XSLT; I'm not happy about this but maybe it needs getting used to or just a better idea; see below)

The more detailed category structure is as follows:

• Community:
  • Grants
  • Publications
  • SIG
• Customization
  • Extension (to be renamed to "DTD Extensions", perhaps? see above)
• Markup (containing both objects to be described (like graphics) and specs to express the description in (like tei:p4) -- while not perfect, I think this state of affairs is bearable)
  • Graphics
    • Facsimiles
    • SVG
  • TEI:P4
  • TEI:P5
• TEI Wiki
  • Users
• Tools
  • Administrative tools
  • All-in-one Tools
  • Analysis tools
  • CSS (sigh, see below)
  • Conversion and preprocessing tools
  • Development tools
  • Editing tools
  • Header creation tools
  • Interfaces
  • Publishing and delivery tools
  • Querying tools
  • Testing and QA tools
  • XQuery (sigh again, see below)
  • XSLT (as above)
    • HTML
    • P4toP5
    • XSLT:1.0
    • XSLT:2.0

How about adding another root category for CSS, XSLT and XQuery? Not sure what concise name to use: "rendering" and "formatting" seem too narrow, "manipulation" seems too vague. Maybe "Markup manipulation", after all? Help? Piotr 23:26, 25 September 2007 (BST)