As I was marking up the Godin article, which has lots of direct quotes from the speech of study subjects, I noticed that we have always marked such speech up using a <q> tag inside a <cit> tag. The TEI Guidelines (both P4 and P5) suggest that a <cit> tag should only be used if the quotation is "together with a bibliographic reference to its source"; otherwise, we should just be using a plain <q> tag. I began the process of correcting this, but then realized that it's actually very problematic because so much of our rendering code depends on the presence of the <cit> tag. At this stage, it would be very complicated to rewrite it.

A simpler solution, therefore, might be to rewrite the P5 transformation so that when the P5 XML versions of the articles are rendered, the problem is corrected, with the external <cit> removed, and its rend attribute (which we often need to specify that quotes are rendered as blocks) transferred to the <q> tag. However, the more I looked into this, the more I realized that we have <q> tags whose associated <bibl> tags are elsewhere in the same paragraph; in other words, it's not always easy to tell whether a quote has a bibliographical reference or not. On balance, it's better, I think, to live with the unnecessary <cit> wrapper. We're slightly at variance with the Guidelines, but it's only a minor issue, and it makes processing much easier.

So this post amounts to public documentation of that variance, which may have to be addressed in the distant future.