At the TEI members meeting way back in October in Baltimore (see previous entry, TEI Members’ Meeting), Lou Burnard gave a great talk about where the TEI is going and the ODD format used to manage the TEI documentation. Lou can give a brilliant talk when he chooses to explain things carefully to lesser minds; that the talk followed an incomprehensible talk aimed at an “in” crowd (making me feel stupid since I should be “in” but obviously wasn’t) made it stand out even more. In it Lou explained where P5 (the next version of the Text Encoding Initiative) was going and talked about ODD (or One Document Does it all.) ODD is an XML resource for documentation of the TEI that is used both for creating the TEI Guidelines and is now to be used to actually create the custom version of the TEI DTD or schema for individual projects.
What is neat about ODD is that it is a form of “literate programming” where the source ODD document can be used to generate both documentation and code (DTD or schema.)
Of course you don’t need to write in ODD to get a schema for use in a project. There is a test replacement for the Pizza Chef called Roma that walks you through the process of generating the relevant validators and documentation. The interface still needs work, but it is still in beta.
For the historians, here is the original 1996 specifications of ODD drawn up by Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard, Form for Draft Chapters of the TEI Guidelines.
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