TEI Technical Council Teleconference, 2023-02-10

Meeting times

• 6:30am PST / 9:30am EST / 2:30pm UTC / 3:30pm CET
• Started: ~14:33Z Ended: ~16:04Z

Present:

• Syd Bauman (SB)
• Helena Bermúdez Sabel (HBS) ~ 8 minutes late
• Elisa Beshero-Bondar (EBB, Chair)
• Hugh Cayless (HC)
• Patricia O'Connor (TOC)
• Sabine Seifert (SS)
• Joey Takeda (JT) ~ 20 minutes late
• Raff Viglianti (RV)

Apologies/Not Present:

• Elli Bleeker (EB)
• Martina Scholger (MS)
• Janelle Jenstad (JJ)
• Magdalena Turska (MT)

Meeting minutes previous month (January 2023) Spring F2F meeting

• May 7–9 at University of Guelph: working at THINCLab (McLaughlin Library)
• Before our F2F is the LINCS Project Conference (May 5–7): CFP. Proposals from Council members are highly encouraged!
• Afterwards 4-day DH@Guelph Workshops: (May 9–12). Call for Workshop Proposals (due 1 March).
• Will we be able to attend both Council meeting & DH@Guelph on Tue 09 May?
  • Find out about the timing
  • Is it okay to submit a proposal?
• Action on EBB by 2023-02-13: Find out about accommodations and overlap with the other 2 events (LINCS before, DH@Guelph after).
  • EBB (updating these minutes on 2023-02-19): Yes, it is okay for Council to book accommodations through the entire conference.
  • See details sent to TEI-Council mailing list on 2023-02-19.

Fall F2F meeting

• Mon 04 Sep to Fri 08 Sep at Paderborn is TEI/MEI Conference (see save the date notice):
• Council may meet before or after the conference (PS)
• Best if Council meets before the conference begins
• Workshops: Mon 04 Sep and Tue 05 Sep
  • Will be held in a different part of town than the main conference
• Council meetings: Fri–Sun, Sat–Mon, or Sun–Tue. Obviously the former means a longer trip, but allows Council members to attend workshops. The last is shorter, but overlaps workshops a lot. The middle one is, well, in the middle.
• Action on EBB by 2023-03-10: Poll council about selection of days.
• Mon 04 Sep is Labour Day in US & Canada

TEI/MEC Conference planning

• RV is committee chair, puts together program committee
• CFP to be posted possibly by Friday 2023-02-17, but no later than Friday 2023-02-24.
• Local organisers pushing for not using ConfTool, but instead using an alternative tool called Indico. They believe this change would make conference attendance 20% less expensive than using ConfTool (but unclear if less expensive than previous conferences).
• Indico needs to be tested. Not sure if it generates the conference program as well as handling the conference submissions and submission review.

Planning the next release

• Last release: October 2022
• Next release: We agreed to circa April 2023
• Planning on Tue 04 Apr (perhaps start on Mon 03 Apr; either way release techs should meet the week before)
• Release techs: JT, HC, SB

Board question on updating the TEI Website’s Tools and Projects page

• Last month we proposed that the Board prepare a Google Form with guidance (descriptions of no longer than N words) for TEI members to describe TEI tools. (This would allow us to list things like FairCopy, LeafWriter, etc.)
• Perhaps another form or the same form to be used for TEI projects.
• EBB discussed this with the Board. They like the idea, but raised a question for us: What do we think of distinguishing Tools maintained by TEI-C from those that are not?
  • Council thinks this reasonable
  • RV suggests something like Awesome DH Tools (https://dh-tech.github.io/awesome-digital-humanities/) for interactive GitHub site
  • HC: We should consider: what is most likely to encourage us (Council and Board) to engage with updating the site?
• The website is not Council Responsibility but Council (esp. Chair) needs to work with it
• Wordpress is a security risk and upkeep is challenging.
• The infrastructure group could be revived (with a combination of Board and Council members) around the website.

Rendering “Attributes” section of tagdocs

• Stylesheets #592 We need a better way to render attributes in the “Attributes” section of the tagdocs for elements and classes.
• Example: https://guidelines.teipublisher.com/ref/acquisition/ and https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-acquisition.html
• From the 2022-12 Stylesheets meeting (which was held 2023-01-05): “General consensus is that this needs to be improved, and a vertical listing with meaningful indentation is probably a good idea. We should do this more like MEI with optional alternative views. https://music-encoding.org/guidelines/v4/elements/abbr.html#attributes”
• Vertical arrangement would be more readable
• Revising punctuation—dealing with parentheses in confusing places.
• Total overhaul of spec pages? Well, maybe not right away, but:
• Start with nesting lists to improve legibility
• SB: Try for the compressed hierarchical, vertical arrangement on the ticket.
• Some council members to work on this at next Stylesheet meeting

Another TEI ODD Processor (ATOP):

• Request that people pay attention to tickets with atop label. While most are not actually blocking progress, resolution would speed things up.
  • SB asks for Council members to read and comment on:
    • #2306 — See below; can we agree within the next week?
    • #2330 — only if you disagree with the consensus we came to at this meeting (see below and the comment on the ticket)
    • #2381 — can we agree within the next week?
  • SB on #2306: As no one has objected to removing model.oddDecl from model.inter, one has given it a thumbs up (Laurent Romary), and several of us (at least SB & MH, probably others) think it is a really good idea; and since at least 2 people (SB and Piotr Bansk) think it needs to be deprecated, SB thinks this should be made GREEN for deprecation. See ticket for precise listing.
  • Discussion of #2330:
    • The main issue is how does a user specify which query language they wish to use, and what happens with conflicting bindings?
    • The <constraintDecl> solution (#2, “adventurous” on the ticket) would allow resolution of potential conflicts
    • HC notes that it is likely that later versions of XSLT would be backwards-compatible with earlier versions. SB notes this is generally, but not always, true; and Schematron defines quite a few possibilities, although in practice only a few are ever used: exslt, stx, xslt, xslt2, xslt3, xpath, xpath2, xpath3, xpath31, xquery, xquery3, and xquery31. Addendum: Note that “xslt” (meaning XSLT 1.0) is the default, so in fact our Stylesheets are doing this incorrectly.
    • What if there's just one central constraintDecl for now to define the binding globally?
      • We could decide later to allow for multiple contraintDecls if called for.
    • Council decides on the <constraintDecl> option but a simpler implementation of it. SB updates the ticket.

RomaJS/Roma Beta Update

• Should we make RomaJS the new Roma with the next release?
  • Present council members agree.
• Update from RV: preparation for the new release, internationalization work, link relocation, etc.
• Will be finished by April 2023 (next TEI release)
  • will have German, Italian, Spanish, French translations ready.
  • Kiyonori's students working on Japanese translations (but probably not ready yet)
  • some bugs to squash yet
• Council approves of releasing the new version of Roma with internationalization as v 1.0.0 and out of beta
  • Old Roma not being maintained by anyone at the moment.
  • Old Roma would stay under a different domain name (possible alternative domain names: Roma Classic, Roma Antiqua)
  • Action HC and RV to work on DNS switch. (It should happen sooner, but can be announced with the next release.)
  • Action on EBB to write the announcement to stop using old Roma and start on the new Roma when its released

TCW for TEI GitHub Webhooks and Secrets

• Update? Action on HC and JT: to write up TCW on webhooks and GitHub dependencies
• (Re See Stylesheets PR #588: Tests fail due to failed Slack webhook action on external PRs)
• EBB opens Stylesheets ticket #594 about this.

Status of TEI mailing lists

• Board will consult Council with a proposed solution, before engaging the membership.
• Options Board is considering:
  • Keep at Brown,
  • Move to another university (that uses listserv) - Northeastern?
  • Find a professional hosting solution like L-Soft
  • Other options?
• Consensus was to investigate L-Soft options and independent hosting expense
• Will also need to speak to Brown librarians and tech infrastructure staff whether we decide to stay or move.