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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
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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.
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