Consolidate gender references

[djbpitt]

Currently every instance of a <char> element has @name and @gender attributes. You need the @name to know which character is being tagged, but each character will always have a consistent gender. This means that could tag just for name and create a separate ancillary document (traditionally called a prosopography or, in TEI terms, personography), where you could encode a mapping between character identifiers and gender. This would let you strip out all of the @gender attributes on <char> elements in the stories (you can do this with XSLT), and you could dereference (look up) the gender of each character reference in the prosopography during processing. The payoff is less markup and less opportunity for error or inconsistency.

[rwal67]

Thank you for the notice Dr. Birnbaum- after considering the options as a group, we have decided to make a compromise, landing somewhat near your suggestion. Opting to append the option for an optional mixed gender attribute value to the schema, in turn to be applied to any elements, we figured because of the framework we have already laid out, it may be best for us to add this alteration to our pre-existing schema and markup as opposed to working anything back from the ground up due to time constraints. If you have any advice or further questions please feel free to let me know

[djbpitt]

@rwal67 Thanks, Rory, for the follow-up. It's your project, so you should proceed as you think best, and I agree that changing your markup strategy at this stage, even if it means simplifying the markup, can nonetheless be disruptive. For what it's worth, if you were to make the change you could do it with XSLT, with no manual retagging. Someone would nonetheless have to write the XSLT, though, and your time might be spent more productively on other activities.

Let us know should you later decide to pursue this, but if you think it better not to, that's fine, and the decision is up to you. You can close this Issue.