Hi there,

David J Birnbaum wrote:
>...given more 
> than one informationally equivalent way of doing something, I have 
> consistently argued that the TEI guidelines should license only one of 
> them (any one, because the virtue comes not from doing something in a 
> particular way, but from having a community that agrees to do it in the 
> same way).

I'm wholeheartedly with you on this. There's nothing more dispiriting to 
new users than to be told there are almost infinite ways to encode the 
publication date of a document in the header, and none of them is 
particularly endorsed by the TEI; and there's nothing more annoying than 
having to write code which tries to find the publication date of a TEI 
document by looking in all the places it might conceivably be. 
Personally, I could live with a lot more "Shut up and do it this way, 
because we say so", rather than "It's up to you, the power is in the 
flexibility". It would certainly make it easier to help new users get 
started. So I guess I really do want TEI to be a standard.

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
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Half-Baked Software, Inc.
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