The Design of the TEI Encoding Scheme

Abstract

This paper discusses the basic design of the encoding scheme described by the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI document number TEI P3, hereafter simply P3 or the Guidelines).¹ It first reviews the basic design goals of the TEI project and their development during the course of the project. Next, it outlines some basic notions relevant for the design of any markup language and uses those notions to describe the basic structure of the TEI encoding scheme. It also describes briefly the “core” tag set defined in chapter 6 of P3, and the “default text structure” defined in chapter 7 of that work. The final section of the paper attempts an evaluation of P3 in the light of its original design goals, and outlines areas in which further work is still needed.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is a Senior Research Programmer at the academic computer center of the University of Illinois at Chicago; his interests include medieval Germanic languages and literatures and the theory of electronic text markup. Since 1988 he has been editor in chief of the ACH/ACL/ALLC Text Encoding Initiative. Lou Burnard is Director of the Oxford Text Archive at Oxford University Computing Services, with interests in electronic text and database technology. He is European Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines.