Private URI Schemes

This page contains a draft proposal for a framework whereby private URI schemes used in TEI attributes with datatypes of data.pointer can be documented and dereferenced.

The Problem

For some time now, we have been discussing the use of "magic tokens" in attributes such as @key. Magic tokens are problematic because they are meaningful only within the context of a specific project (@key "provides an externally-defined means of identifying the entity (or entities) being named, using a coded value of some kind"). We currently suggest that @key attributes be documented through the use of a <taxonomy> element in the TEI header. However, documentation in this way does not provide a machine-readable method of dereferencing a key.

We plan to discourage the use of @key and friends in future, and encourage instead the use of private URI schemes in