Inconsistencies in the witness registration

[stenskjaer]

Today I wanted to register some different hands in a witness:

<listWit>
  <witness xml:id="L">Leipzig UB 1359, ff. 44r-77v
  <msDesc>
    <physDesc>
      <handDesc>
        <handNote sameAs="h1" xml:id="L1" scope="major" medium="brown">
          Main hand. Brown ink.
        </handNote>
        <handNote xml:id="h2" scope="minor" medium="black">
          Secondary hand. Black ink.
        </handNote>
        <handNote xml:id="h3" scope="minor" medium="light brown">
          Tertiary hand. Light brown ink.
        </handNote>
      </handDesc>
    </physDesc>
  </msDesc>
  </witness>
</listWit>

Oxygen then starts yelling: element "physDesc" not allowed yet; missing required element "msIdentifier" This encoding is, I believe, in accordance with the guidelines (see http://lombardpress.org/schema/docs/critical/#sourcedesc). So what do I do?

Actually it hit me whether we should change the schema to let the list of witnesses simply be able to hold a list of manuscript descriptions and discard the <witness> element. So something like this could be a list of witnesses:

<listWit>
  <msDesc>
    <msIdentifier xml:id="L">Leipzig UB 1359, ff. 44r-77v</msIdentifier>
    <physDesc>
      <handDesc>
        <handNote sameAs="h1" xml:id="L1" scope="major" medium="brown">
          Main hand. Brown ink.
        </handNote>
        <handNote xml:id="h2" scope="minor" medium="black">
          Secondary hand. Black ink.
        </handNote>
        <handNote xml:id="h3" scope="minor" medium="light brown">
          Tertiary hand. Light brown ink.
        </handNote>
      </handDesc>
    </physDesc>
  </msDesc>
</listWit>

This would of course add an extra level in simple lists like this:

<listWit>
  <witness xml:id="O" n="oriel33">Oxford, Oriel College Library 33, ff. 164r-182v</witness>
  <witness xml:id="B" n="bal">Oxford, Balliol College 311, ff. 148r--181v</witness>
</listWit>

Which would have to look like this:

<listWit>
  <msDesc>
    <msIdentifier xml:id="O" n="oriel33">Oxford, Oriel College Library 33, ff. 164r-182v</msIdentifier>
  </msDesc>
  <msDesc>
    <msIdentifier xml:id="B" n="bal">Oxford, Balliol College 311, ff. 148r--181v</msIdentifier>
  </msDesc>
</listWit>

Here it would be so easy to add descriptions of the manuscripts.

On the other hand: This goes against the idea of splitting up concerns. This would require a manuscript description in each item file. That may be a very bad idea actually. But if we want to keep it out of the item files, maybe we should walk the line and also remove the hand descriptions to some external source.

In a top-level repository of text items there could simply be a "witnesses.xml" with ids matching the ids of the <witness> elements in each item. During processing that would be the authority for information about the witnesses, hands etc.

Maybe I actually prefer that solution, or something similar.