TEI Guidelines

The TEI Guidelines "have been developed and are maintained by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI). They are addressed to anyone who works with any kind of textual resource in digital form.

"They make recommendations about suitable ways of representing those features of textual resources which need to be identified explicitly in order to facilitate processing by computer programs. In particular, they specify a set of markers (or tags) which may be inserted in the electronic representation of the text, in order to mark the text structure and other features of interest. Many, or most, computer programs depend on the presence of such explicit markers for their functionality, since without them a digitized text appears to be nothing but a sequence of undifferentiated bits. The success of the World Wide Web, for example, is partly a consequence of its use of such markup to indicate such features as headings and lists on individual pages, and to indicate links between pages. The process of inserting such explicit markers for implicit textual features is often called 'markup', or equivalently within this work 'encoding'; the term 'tagging' is also used informally. We use the term encoding scheme or markup language to denote the complete set of rules associated with the use of markup in a given context; we use the term markup vocabulary for the specific set of markers or named distinctions employed by a given encoding scheme. Thus, this work both describes the TEI encoding scheme, and documents the TEI markup vocabulary."