Introductory Note (May 1999)

No work of the size and complexity of the TEI Guidelines could reasonably be expected to be error-free on publication, nor to remain long uncorrected. It has however taken rather longer than might have been anticipated to complete production of the present corrected reprint of the first edition, for which we present our apologies, both to the many individuals and institutions whose enthusiastic adoption and promotion of the TEI encoding scheme have ensured its continued survival in the rapidly changing world of digital scholarship, and also to the many helpfully critical users whose assiduous uncovering and reporting of our errors have made possible the present revision.

At its first meeting in Bergen, in June 1996, the TEI Technical Review Committee (TRC) approved the setting up of a small working committee to oversee the production of a revised edition of the TEI Guidelines , to include corrections of as many as possible of the `corrigible errors' notified to the editors since publication of the first edition in May 1994, the bulk of which are summarized in a TEI working paper (TEI EDW67, available from the TEI website).

During the spring of 1997, this TRC Core Subcommittee reviewed nearly 200 comments and proposals which the editors had collected from public debate and discussion over the preceding two years, and provided invaluable technical guidance in disposition of them. We are glad to take this opportunity of expressing our thanks to this subcommittee, whose members were Elli Mylonas, Dominic Dunlop, and David T. Barnard.

The work of making the corrections and regenerating the text proceeded rather fitfully during 1998 and 1999, largely because of increasing demands on the editors' time from their other responsibilities. With the establishment of the new TEI Consortium, it is be hoped that maintenance of the Guidelines will be placed on a more secure footing. Some specific areas in which we anticipate future revisions being carried out are listed below.

Typographic corrections made

• examples of TEI markup throughout the text were all checked against the relevant DTD fragment and an embarassingly large number of tagging errors corrected;
• various minor typographic and spelling errors were corrected;
• the corrigible errors listed in working paper TEI EDW67 were all corrected: some of these required specific changes to the DTD which are listed in the next section.

Specific changes in the DTD

A major goal of this revision was to avoid changes which might invalidate existing data, even where existing constructs seemed erroneous in retrospect. To that end, wherever changes have been made in content models for existing elements, they have as far as possible been made so that the DTD will now accept a superset of what was previously legal. Only one new element (<ab> ) has been added.

Where possible, a few content models have been changed in such a way as to facilitate conversion to XML, but XML compatibility is nota goal of this revision.

Brief details of all changes made in the DTD follow:

• Several changes were made in class membership, in order to correct unreachability problems. Specifically:
  • elements <geogName> , <persName> , <placeName> were added to the m.data class;
  • <geogName> and <placeName> were removed from the m.placepart class.
  • the elements <addSpan> , <delSpan> , <gap> , were added to the m.Edit class;
  • a new class m.editIncl was defined, with members <addSpan> , <delSpan> , and <gap> ; this class was then added to the global inclusion class m.globIncl along with <anchor> (erroneously a member of the m.Seg class, from which it is now removed), m.metadata and m.refsys .
• added <name> element to m.addrPart class;
• added <dateLine> to m.divtop and m.divbot classes;
• added <epilogue> and <castList> to m.dramafront class;
• added <divGen> to m.front class;
• added <dateLine> to m.divtop and m.divtop classes;
• added <u> element to a.declaring class;
• defined new class m.fmchunk (front matter chunk), comprising <argument> , <byline> , <docAuthor> , <docDate> , <docEdition> , <docImprint> , <docTitle> , <epigraph> , <head> , and <titlePart> for use in simplification of the content model for <front> element;
• defined new element <ab> (anonymous block), and added it to the m.chunk class;
• corrected an error whereby global attributes were not properly defined for elements specifying a non-default value for any of the a.global attributes: elements affected include: <foreign> , <hi> , <del> , <pb> , <lb> , <cb> , <language> , <anchor> , and <when> ;
• changed content models to permit empty <list> and empty <availability> elements;
• changed content model for <series> element to permit #PCDATA;
• changed content model for <setting> element to permit <date> element as a direct child;
• added a key attribute to the <distance> element, for consistency with other elements in its class;
• changed content model for <orgName> element to make it more consistent with e.g. <persname> ;
• changed content model for <opener> element to include <argument> , <byLine> , and <epigraph> ;
• change content models for <app> , <rdgGrp> , and <wit> elements;
• revised attributes on <hand> element.
• Finally, a number of content models were changed with a view to easing the creation of an XML compatible version of the Guidelines. Specifically:
  • removed ampersand connectors from <cit> , <respStmt> , <publicationStmt> , and <graph> ;
  • changed the mixed content models for <sense> , <re> , <persName> , <placeName> , <geogName> , <dateStruct> , <timeStruct> , and <dateLine> to make them XML conformant.

Outstanding errors

A small number of other known problems remain uncorrected in this version and are briefly listed below. Please watch the TEI mailing list for announcements of their correction.

• elements of class inter don't always behave as they should (e.g. one cannot insert a <table> before anything else in a <div> );
• some mixed-content problems consequent on the definition of specialPara need to be addressed systematically; in particular, the treatment of list items or notes which contain several paragraphs continues to surprise many users: no white space is allowed between the paragraphs;
• the resp attributes on editorial elements are not consistently defined;
• the discussions of DTD invocation, and the DTD itself, all use system identifiers instead of formal public identifiers.

Our next priority however will be the production of a fully XML-compliant version of the TEI DTD, work on which is already well advanced.