Release 4.7.0 is codenamed ‘in nova fert animus’.
This release introduces new features and resolves a number of issues raised by the TEI community. As always, 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 4.7.0 milestone.
The following changes are particularly worth highlighting in this release:
New encoding features
- New with this release is the eventName element, which may be used to encode names of events in general transcribed text, or in the event element. The new eventName element also has membership in several attribute classes associated with named entities, including att.datable to supply a date range for the use of an event’s name, and att.typed, allowing it type and subtype attributes. It is also a member of att.editLike, giving it the evidence attribute (#2382).
- The content model of event has been modified to contain eventName elements, but still allows older ways of labeling events. See PR #2483.
- The taxonomy and category elements are now added to att.datacat (#2419).
Changes to content models
- The content model of content has been changed to permit only one child element from model.contentPart (#2381).
- At the request of the Manuscript SIG, the content model of additional is now more flexible, permitting any alternation of model.pLike (p or ab) instead of zero or one each of adminInfo, surrogates, or listBibl (#2195).
- The content model of revisionDesc now permits multiple listChange elements (#2420).
- A Schematron constraint has been added to the specification for dataSpec in order to prevent the possibility of elements being included in the specification for an attribute’s datatype (PR #2443 and #2426).
- A scheme attribute is now optional on a constraintSpec with a mode of either "change" or "delete" (it is still required when mode is "add", "replace", or unspecified — see PR #2453 and #2261).
- The datatype of the class attribute on attRef has been changed from teidata.word to teidata.name (#2276).
With these release notes we are beginning a practice of documenting changes that could invalidate ODD customizations in TEI projects if they are working with the current release of these TEI Guidelines. Those maintaining ODD customizations of the TEI may want to be aware of the following changes and adapt your ODD files accordingly.
ODD-breaking changes and deprecation
- The calendar attribute has been removed from att.datable because it is supposed to designate information about a date represented in an element’s contents, and thus should not be applied to elements that do not contain dates. To clarify its intended usage, calendar has been moved to a new class, att.calendarSystem, and its use is now deprecated on many elements. The calendar attribute is now properly available only on date, time, origDate, and docDate. See #2045.
Improvements of prose and examples
- The title of the Guidelines section 2.2.8 has been changed to more accurately reflect its content (#2415).
- Several revisions were applied to the explanation of TEI XPointer Schemas in the Guidelines section 16.2.4 (#2083).
- A new example was added for langKnown (#2139).
- The examples for use of the key attribute are updated and a source attribution corrected (#2144).
- Several Japanese translations have been added to element, attribute, and class specifications (PRs #2448, #2449, and #2461).
- Inconsistencies have been corrected in initial capitalization and initial spacing of the French descriptions in element specifications (#2486)
- Descriptions of the ident and usage attributes on the language element have been improved (#2447).
Housekeeping
- Bugs have been corrected in the processing of Guidelines release notes to HTML (#2070).
- The version ‘P5’ is now properly represented in footers and headings of the published TEI Guidelines on the web (#2413).
- Bookmark links on examples in the Guidelines now feature mouseover text (#2137).
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 at https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 7.56.0 milestone.
Highlights of this release include:
- Attributes shown on element and class specification pages are now formatted as a vertical nested list to improve legibility (PR #619 and #2489).
- A bug in Stylesheets ODD processing that had produced output files with multiple superfluous filename extensions has now been corrected (Stylehsheets 543).
- A serious problem in the processing of ns attributes in ODD customizations has been fixed (Stylesheets #424).
- The Guidelines now output the sch: prefix consistently when representing elements in the Schematron namespace (Stylesheets #529)
- A bug has been fixed in the ODD processing of more than one anyElement in a content model so that it no longer generates an invalid Relax NG output (Stylesheets #631).
- The xml:id on list elements is now properly being translated to an HTML id attribute in HTML list container elements (Stylesheets #616 and PR #617).
- The teitohtml stylesheet now properly highlights val and tag elements in HTML output (#567).
- Improvements and bug corrections have been applied to the docx to tei conversion (Stylesheets #524, #610, and PR #634).