On 09/06/11 07:34, Martin Mueller wrote:
> This has been a very helpful and interesting discussion that I think I
> sort of understand. But I don't really understand it, and I am fairly sure
> that few of my friends and colleagues in English departments or academic
> libraries understand it either.
>
> Is there somebody out there who can explain layman's language what is at
> stake in using microdata to manage the TEI/HTML5 relationship and why or
> how this would help scholars as they work with textual data in digital
> form?

The HTML community(-ies) realised that there were existing XML schemas 
which had lives independent of HTML that HTML was never going to be able 
to encode. So they created a method for wrapping third-party XML tags in 
HTML so that the third-party XML can be used in HTML5.

This works really well for XML that is effective semantic annotation of 
running text. Things like <tei:person/> and <tei:w type="verb"/>. These 
are pretty much the motivating use case for microdata.

How it would work for things like standoff markup and genetic editions, 
is another question. Certainly you can map the TEI to HTML5. It doesn't, 
however, solve the question of how you display it to the user.

cheers
stuart
-- 
Stuart Yeates
Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/