for the sake of explicitly identifying the encoding methodology with the immediate practical application of having oxygen recognize various classes tei documents and assigning validation and transformation scenarios accordingly
eg.
<editorialdecl methodology="teisimple”></p>
<p>other possible values: " teilite",="" "jtei"<="" p=""></editorialdecl>
Is this meant really as a shorthand for saying "this is a TEI Simple document"? Or is there some deeper need? What's the use case? Assigning to James to get some clarification and discussion going in Council.
Yes, except I wouldn't call it 'shorthand' but 'place to explicitly declare a document to be certain tei flavor'. Flavor then could be TEI Simple or jTEI etc.