TEI Authoring SIG

[Note: The Authoring SIG is no longer active.]
The aim of the TEI Special Interest Group on Authoring is to develop good practice in using the TEI markup to write modern office-type documents (reports, web pages, articles etc). This covers:
  • which elements to use from existing modules, and for what
  • which new elements or attributes are needed
  • ideas about incorporating other XML languages (MathML, SVG, Docbook etc)
  • suitable authoring tools
The aim is to generate:
  • examples of TEI subsets and extensions used for authoring
  • guidelines on for authors thinking of using the TEI
  • suggestions to the TEI Technical Council about which new elements are needed in P5 to support this area

To join the discussion list on this topic, send a message to tei-authoring-sig-subscribe@lists.tei-c.org.uk

Thoughts from a face to face meeting at the 2003 TEI members meeting

This TEI SIG is about using TEI markup for reports, web sites, and other documents being created now. The reason for this is that it seems to makes sense to use the same markup in your writing as you use in research. This provides a lot of potential for getting the TEI used. However, the process must be invisible for non-TEI folks, using an editor which hides TEI from the writer. There is a need for a range of tools which allow neophytes to start on the TEI with a low barrier; given that they will then start to abuse the semantics of the TEI. Does this matter? Can people be persuaded to deal with ideas of abstract markup? There are two schools of thought:
  1. teach them Emacs, and force them to confront reality
  2. hide everything in OpenOffice and make people write TEI without knowing they are doing so
Is there a place for an editing system which censors the document on the fly? ie removing empty paragraphs?

What about simplification of schemas for editing? ie suppress everything but a very small set of tags at a given time.

We need examples of document types.

Is TEI Lite sufficient for authoring reports? What additional tags are needed? Can we incrementally build up a new tag set based on user practice? Start with the Lite tags and add to them as a group of authors request new features? Is there a single set of additions needed for «authoring»? Do we need to simply add some extra tags in general, or start looking at quite distinct developments for different areas? Do we need modules of some kind? Alternatively, is this a problem calling out for namespaces? ie combining together bits from the TEI, or other XML languages, as needed?

Authoring web sites: do we describe web pages as TEI documents, or web sites as TEI documents? ie does the TEI markup cover the site architecture?

Our aim is to get together people who will actually use authoring subsets of the TEI and propose which extra tags are needed. There will be a public repository of authoring schemes, and (hopefully) tool support as needed. If all goes, we will end up with some universally-agreed extensions, and some specialized modules.