TEI P5 version 2.1.0 release notes

This is a maintenance release of the P5 Guidelines, which does however introduce some changes in existing content models.

The majority of these changes and corrections are a consequence of feature requests or bugs reported by the TEI community, using the Sourceforge tracking system. The Council has also launched an initiative to make some systematic improvements in the prose of the Guidelines, notably in normalising some spelling and punctuation variations.

Since the last release (14 February 2012), the Council has considered and disposed of 70 tickets entered in the sourceforge tracking system, from 15 different members of the TEI community. Full details may be found at http://tei.sf.net : an active list sorted by ticket number is available at the url http://bit.ly/N2P9Q2 and ticket numbers are also referenced in the subversion ChangeLog, as usual.

Schema Changes

These changes should not affect existing documents, but do result in changes to the generated schemas. The content models of availability, encodingDesc, formula, idno postscript, spGrp, surface, and table have been modified to remove some inappropriate restrictions (3449887, 1650195, 3437782, 3441658, 3305016) Additional schematron constraints have been implemented for several elements, notably for attDef, delSpan and other members of the att.spanning class. A new class att.datcat has been introduced to permit the use of ISO Standard Data Category Registry values where appropriate (3432520) The attribute version has been renamed versionDate to clarify its function (3393781) A new class att.witnessed was introduced to ensure that only appropriate elements carry the wit attribute (3496951) A new attribute targetLang was added to the att.pointing class to specify the language of the content of an element being pointed to (3288293)

Textual Changes

A large number of minor enhancements of various kinds were implementing, ranging from correction of typos and normalisation of punctuation, to rewording of phrases considered needlessly obscure. In addition, a number of systematic checks and enhancements were carried out : explicit usage examples are being added for all attributes specified, to complement those already provided for all elements; several passages reported as misleading or ambiguous in sourceforge tickets were reworded or clarified; some cosmetic changes were made to the formatting of the PDF and HTML versions of the Guidelines, notably to ensure that only open source fonts are used throughout; a large number of typos were corrected, many of them reported by a few careful proofreaders from the TEI Community (particular thanks this time to Jens Østergaard Petersen and to Pablo Rodriguez who between them reported over 30 errors!)

Environmental Changes

The production of new releases of TEI P5 is now almost entirely automated, with all modifications continuously tested using a pair of Jenkins continuous integration servers. This has necessitated development and maintenance of a suite of scripts which have seen a large number of changes since the Council decided to ensure that a TEI P5 Release could be tested and delivered by any Council member. Full details of the procedure for doing this are now provided in a Council working Paper available at http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Council/Working/tcw22.xml.