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Schematizing XML: TEI and Project Constraints

Rebecca Parker edited this page Jan 27, 2019 · 17 revisions

XML can be schema checked so that only certain elements and attribute values are permitted. An XML schema can also define a particular order elements are expected to appear in the existing "well-formed" hierarchy of XML. Such validation abilities are what has brought us the TEI and are why most projects have specific documentation regarding the elements, attributes, and the document hierarchy of the project's XML files.

What is the TEI?

TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative. In the most general sense, the TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that is widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to represent all kinds of textual material for online research and teaching. The TEI Consortium is an international organization of scholars whose mission is to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and linguistic texts. Those guidelines are referred to as the TEI Guidelines or Schema. The schema and guidelines (documentation on the schema) define the “grammar” for how certain elements and attributes are to be used and provide the rules for nesting, sequencing, etc.