Suggested values of @rend in <list>

[martinascholger]

As a follow-up on ticket #2683, the European VF2F subgroup proposes to provide suggested values for @rend in <list>. These should be numbered, bulleted, and simple.

[martindholmes]

Note that I made this note in the list.xml spec file in 2014:

MDH 2014-08-31: I'm removing an override of @rend which was last present in rev 12971, per discussions
on the Council list. Its original purpose was to provide a guided transition between the old uses of
@type and the new recommendation to use @rend, but the general consensus is that providing suggestions
in the prose is better than formalizing them in the ODD.

I don't know why Council felt that way at the time; perhaps someone else who was also around will remember. I think I was in favour of the override, but was in a minority.

[sydb]

I also have vague, basically useless recollections of the topic, and I think I was also in favor of the override, but that may be colored by my current thinking. Scanning the Council meeting minutes of 2014, I found a few entries that are apropos, but nothing that really gives us a definitive answer. (See below for the most relevant excerpts.)

Do we have enough of the Subversion history to extract revision 12971?

At the moment, I am definitely, but only mildly, in favor of our providing an override — a list of either suggested or sample values for list/@type. But I concede that coming up with that list may be difficult. The major things that jump to my mind are not of the same kind of division: "ordered" (which does not mean “numbered” it means “the encoded order has meaning”), "unordered" (“the encoded order does not imply any semantics”), and "ut erat" (for “as it was” meaning “the encoded order is as it was in the source” leaving it to the user to decide if the order has meaning or not — I do not really know much Latin, so take the actual value with a huge grain of salt); and "gloss" (and maybe "spec", pending our decision on #2706 and further consideration).

apropos excerpts

-11

• Action: on all Council to read the wiki page on FR460 (list/@type feedback to MH & SB within a week.

(The wiki page it refers to does not seem to be available any more.)

issue #	issue name	comments
460	list/​ type="unordered" is not recommended, but used often	Council decides this is release blocking. MH and SB to carry it out. All of Council to read the wiki page and feedback to M & S within a week.

-12

List Types (MH/SR)

MH values of @rend are suggested in prose, not <valList> because of tech problem. All uses have been changed. Stylesheets updated. Prose updated in CO to suggest use of @rend or @style (@rend rather than @rendition because it is a more straightforward conversion, of documents or of practice, from @type). Sole remaining recommended value for @type is ‘gloss.’ SB wants to clarify that we aren’t specifically recommending @rend but any of @rend/@rendition/@style

MH eventually to add a schematron to warn that use of our formerly recommended values of @type is bad practice.

PFS and SB ask about different @type of list and what other values this might have? JC: ‘Shopping’, ‘Laundry’; MH: These are really just arbitrary values; it seems strange to include them in a suggested value list. @type="gloss" is a special case because a large part of the chapter is devoted to elaborating its usage.

[Discussion of various types of list and analogies with other elements]

Action on SB: Look at modified chapter and feed back any suggested changes to chapter.