Release 4.11.0 is codenamed ‘The Paperclip Release’. The paperclip resistance was a symbolic act during World War II where Norwegians wore paperclips on their clothing to defy the Nazi occupation and show unity, and it has been recently revived as a symbol of peaceful act of protest. For more information, see here.
This release introduces new features and resolves a number of issues raised by the TEI community. The majority of these changes and corrections are a consequence of feature requests or bugs reported by the TEI community using the GitHub tracking system. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 4.11.0 milestone. Many thanks to the community contributors who reported issues, sent bug fixes, and helped with the drafting that led to this release, including: John Bampton, Ron Van den Branden, Lou Burnard, Stefan Dumont, Gabriel Egan, Julia Martin, Peter Stadler, and Klaus Rettinghaus.
The following changes are particularly worth highlighting in this release:
Changes to content models and classes
- The address element is significantly updated with this release: address is now permitted inside div (#2460 and PR #2790), and it is now a member of att.canonical and att.typed, providing it with new attributes type, subtype, key, and ref (#2459 and PR #2844).
- The spGrp element may now self-nest, and a new suggested value of "parallel" has been added for the org attribute of that element. New examples are provided in the Guidelines for encoding simultaneous speaking in performance texts (#2695 and PR #2866).
- The entryFree element may now self-nest (#2860).
- The content model of lem now permits the speaker element (#2316 and PR #2807).
- The content models of arc and node have been simplified and clarified to permit a minimum of zero and a maximum of two label element children (#2761 and PR #2762).
- A requirement of a type attribute on a nested standOff element has been removed because the the standOff element may not self-nest (PR #2769).
- With this release, the content model of post has been modified slightly to prevent ambiguity due to the changes introduced in the class membership of address (PR #2818).
The following changes introduced with this release could invalidate ODD customizations in TEI projects. Those maintaining ODD customizations of the TEI should be aware of the following changes and may need to adapt their ODD files accordingly.
ODD-breaking changes and deprecations
- The name attributes has been used to specify a RelaxNG pattern on the attRef element, but this usage is now deprecated because name is not appropriately defined for such patterns. Thus this release replaces the name attribute with the key attribute instead (See #2282 comment, #2850, and PR #2852).
- The dataRef element now requires one and only one of the attributes key, name, or ref which had previously been defined as optional (#2838 and PR #2839).
- A new Schematron constraint now checks each attList and flags as an error the presence of multiple attDef elements within it with the same ident. (#2371 and PR #2534).
Improvements of prose and examples
- Explanations of attributes with similar meanings in att.global.rendition, att.handFeatures, att.linguistic, and att.measurement have been updated for clarity and disambiguation. As a result of this change, the Guidelines no longer assert that ‘Where both rendition and rend are supplied, the latter is understood to override or complement the former.’. Thus a project that now wishes to retain this relationship between rend and rendition should explicitly document that relationship, probably in their ODD file. (#2744 and PR #2853).
- An example of eventName in the Names, Dates, People, and Places chapter has been updated (PR #2834).
- An example in French has been corrected to include a rend rather than type attribute on a list element (#2736 and PR #2820).
- Edits to clarify the usage of titlePart within docTitle in TEI Tite encoding of title pages finally permit us to close our oldest open issue #869 with PR #2778.
Documentation
- The Preface of TEI Guidelines (FM1) has been partially revised to provide a simple retrospective introduction to the origins of TEI P5 (PR #2869 and PR #2871, making a start on the larger revision tasks outlined in #2865).
- We have updated TCW 22 on the TEI Guidelines release procedure (Documentation #20 and #21) and TCW 31 on updating the p5subset.xml. (Documentation #28).
Housekeeping
- The testing suite for the Guidelines now includes more verbose messaging to help improve debugging (PR #2819).
- The Makefile for the Stylesheets testing suite has been updated to improve the testing process and documentation (Stylesheets PR #788 and PR #793), and a superfluous test file has been identified and removed (Stylesheets #438 and PR #768).
- The source of a persistent typo in the Guidelines-generated Documents has been identified and corrected (#2714).
- A few pointers that were missing leading hashmarks in their values were corrected (PR #2764).
In addition, many improvements have been made to the XSLT stylesheets (which provide processing of TEI ODD files for Roma and TEIGarage as well as other TEI conversions). The Stylesheets are maintained separately from the Guidelines in the Stylesheets repository. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 7.60.0 milestone.
Highlights of this release follow.
- The Stylesheets have been updated to process the new key attribute on attRef (Stylesheets #795 and PR #796).
- The processing of the minOccurs and maxOccurs attributes has been amended to correct the processing of maxOccurs when its value is 2 or more but not ‘unbounded’ (Stylesheets #773 and PR #774).
- XML comments within Schematron rules are now removed from output ODD documentation (Stylesheets #746 and PR #766).
- The Stylesheets now apply the rend attribute rather than the type attribute for describing the rendering of lists from other document formats (Stylesheets #734, Guidelines PR #2785, and Stylesheets PR #745).
- The Stylesheets have been corrected to prevent the insertion of footnote markers before Spanish inverted question marks (“¿”) and exclamation marks (“¡”) (Stylesheets PR #787).