Appendix C4. Preface (April 1994)

TEI P4 Home

Appendix C4. Preface (April 1994)

Introductory Note (March 2002)

1 About These Guidelines

2 A Gentle Introduction to XML

3 Structure of the TEI Document Type Definition

4 Languages and Character Sets

5 The TEI Header

6 Elements Available in All TEI Documents

7 Default Text Structure

8 Base Tag Set for Prose

9 Base Tag Set for Verse

10 Base Tag Set for Drama

11 Transcriptions of Speech

12 Print Dictionaries

13 Terminological Databases

14 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment

15 Simple Analytic Mechanisms

16 Feature Structures

17 Certainty and Responsibility

18 Transcription of Primary Sources

19 Critical Apparatus

20 Names and Dates

21 Graphs, Networks, and Trees

22 Tables, Formulae, and Graphics

23 Language Corpora

24 The Independent Header

25 Writing System Declaration

26 Feature System Declaration

27 Tag Set Documentation

28 Conformance

29 Modifying and Customizing the TEI DTD

30 Rules for Interchange

31 Multiple Hierarchies

32 Algorithm for Recognizing Canonical References

33 Element Classes

34 Entities

35 Elements

36 Obtaining the TEI DTD

37 Obtaining TEI WSDs

38 Sample Tag Set Documentation

39 Formal Grammar for the TEI-Interchange-Format Subset of SGML

Appendix A Bibliography

Appendix B Index

Appendix C4. Preface (April 1994)

Appendix D Colophon

These Guidelines are the result of over five years' effort by members of the research and academic community within the framework of an international cooperative project called the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), established in 1987 under the joint sponsorship of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing.

The impetus for the project came from the humanities computing community, which sought a common encoding scheme for complex textual structures in order to reduce the diversity of existing encoding practices, simplify processing by machine, and encourage the sharing of electronic texts. It soon became apparent that a sufficiently flexible scheme could provide solutions for text encoding problems generally. The scope of the TEI was therefore broadened to meet the varied encoding requirements of any discipline or application. Thus, the TEI became the only systematized attempt to develop a fully general text encoding model and set of encoding conventions based upon it, suitable for processing and analysis of any type of text, in any language, and intended to serve the increasing range of existing (and potential) applications and use.

What is published here is a major milestone in this effort. It provides a single, coherent framework for all kinds of text encoding which is hardware-, software- and application-independent. Within this framework, it specifies encoding conventions for a number of key text types and features. The ongoing work of the TEI is to extend the scheme presented here to cover additional text types and features, as well as to continue to refine its encoding recommendations on the basis of extensive experience with their actual application and use.

We therefore offer these Guidelines to the user community for use in the same spirit of active collaboration and cooperation with which they have so far been developed. The TEI is committed to actively supporting the wide-spread and large-scale use of the Guidelines which, with the publication of this volume, is now for the first time possible. In addition, we anticipate that users of the TEI Guidelines will in some instances adapt and extend them as necessary to suit particular needs; we invite such users to engage in the further development of the Guidelines by working with us as they do so.

Like any standard which is actually used, these Guidelines do not represent a static finished work, but rather one which will evolve over time with the active involvement of its community of users. We invite and encourage the participation of the the user community in this process, in order to ensure that the TEI Guidelines become and remain useful in all sorts of work with machine-readable texts.

This document was made possible in part by financial support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency; Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Communities; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Direct and indirect support has also been received from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Oxford University Computing Services, the University of Arizona, the University of Oslo and Queen's University (Kingston, Ont.), and Ohio State University.

The production of this document has been greatly facilitated by the willingness of many software vendors to provide us with evaluation versions of their products. Most parts of this text have been processed at some time by almost every currently available SGML-aware software system. In particular, we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following vendors:

• Berger-Levrault AIS s.a. (for Balise);
• E2S n.v. (for E2S Advanced SGML Editor);
• Electronic Book Technology (for DynaText);
• SEMA Group and Yard Software (for Mark-It and Write-It);
• Software Exoterica (for CheckMark and Xtran);
• SoftQuad, Inc., (for Author/Editor and RulesBuilder);
• WordPerfect Corporation (for Intellitag);
• Xerox Corporation (for Ventura Publisher).

Details of the software actually used to produce the current document are given in the colophon at the end of the work.