TEI Guidelines

"About These 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."

"Structure and Notational Conventions of this Document"
"The body of this edition of these Guidelines proper contains 23 chapters arranged in increasing order of specialist interest. The first five chapters discuss in depth matters likely to be of importance to anyone intending to apply the TEI scheme to virtually any kind of text. The next seven focus on particular kinds of text: verse, drama, spoken text, dictionaries, and manuscript materials. The next nine chapters deal with a wide range of topics, one or more of which are likely to be of interest in specialist applications of various kinds. The last two chapters deal with the XML encoding used to represent the TEI scheme itself, and provide technical information about its implementation. The last chapter also defines the notion of TEI conformance and its implications for interchange of materials produced according to these Guidelines."