Transpiling MEI to RELAX NG

Day 1 of @teimec2023@hcommons.social, Workshop on integrating TEI and MEI. Found not so much a bug in our ODD to RELAX NG transpiler but problems in the MEI customization.

  1. Defining attributes with "prefixed" @idents but no @ns

<attDef ident="xlink:role" usage="opt">
  <desc>Characterization of the relationship between resources. 
        The value of the role attribute must be a URI.</desc>
  <datatype>
    <rng:ref name="data.URI"/>
  </datatype>
</attDef>

Technically this is valid with regards to the TEI schema but poses the question to which namespace URI the prefix xlink: is supposed to be bound. All those attributes specifications should add a @ns with the value of http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink.

  1. Using mixing ODD and RELAX NG specification elements

In the example above the datatype of the @xlink:role is defined by a reference to a RELAX NG pattern. The MEI customization contains a related macro specification of the same name.


<macroSpec ident="data.URI" module="MEI" type="dt">
  <desc>A Uniform Resource Identifier, see [RFC2396].</desc>
  <content>
    <rng:data type="anyURI"/>
  </content>
</macroSpec>

The connection between these two specification elements is only implied. It presupposes a) the macroSpec to be transpiled to a RELAX NG pattern and b) a TEI ODD to RELAX NG transpiler to keep specifications even if they are not used.

The latter problem will be solved with a move to pure ODD. Both issues need to be solved to make MEI independent of a particular TEI ODD processing software.

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