On 23 Oct 2011, at 18:48, Syd Bauman wrote:

> Hmmm ... on re-reading the Guidelines
> (http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SA.html#SASYMP),
> I think you may be right. But it seems counter to what I imagine is
> the most common use case, in which I want to set up a timeline with
> respect to a particular part of my audio or audio-visual artifact.
> *Any* spot I want to indicate in a movie can be measured from the
> begining of the movie; it's awfully hard to measure it based on when
> I started watching.

well, I agree. It's not clear whether in the transition to P5 we bungled
the definition of @absolute by making it data.temporal, or whether
there was a use case for the "point in real time" notation. Looking
at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p4-doc/html/ref-WHEN.html
does not help much. The example at
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p4-doc/html/SA.html#SASYMP
of 

    <when id="w0" absolute="sometime Monday morning before Christmas"/>

sort of implies real time, but in a weird way. P5's

    <when xml:id="w0" absolute="11:30:00"/>

is a bit clearer, though its not obvious why it helps
to know the time of day but not the date.

I suspect someone once had a pretty clear idea
of how <timeline> was going to be used, but  I wonder
whether successive scribes have not mangled the original :-}

The radical may say "Since SMIL now exists, why doesn't
the TEI defer to that and abandon its odd timeline markup".
But that's for another day.
--
Stormageddon Rahtz      
Head of Information and Support Group, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

Sólo le pido a Dios
que el futuro no me sea indiferente