TEI Lite: An Introduction to Text Encoding for Interchange

Abstract

Prefatory note TEI Lite was the name adopted for what the TEI editors originally conceived of as a simple demonstration of how the TEI encoding scheme might be adopted to meet 90% of the needs of 90% of the TEI user community. In retrospect, it was predictable that many people should imagine TEI Lite to be all there is to TEI, or find TEI Lite to be far too heavy for their needs (to meet the latter criticism, Michael also prepared a special barebones version of TEI Lite). TEI Lite was based largely on our observations of existing and previous practice in the encoding of texts, particularly as manifest in the collections of the Oxford Text Archive and in our own experience. It is therefore unsurprising that it seems to have become, if not a de facto standard, at least a common point of departure for electronic text centres and encoding projects world wide. Maybe the fact that we actually produced this shortish, readable, manual for it also helped. That manual was, of course, authored and is maintained in the DTD it describes, originally as an XML document. This makes it easy to produce a number of differently formatted versions in HTML, PDF, etc., some of which can be found in The TEI Vault. Early adopters of TEI Lite included a number of ‘Electronic Text Centers’, many of whom produced their own documentation and tutorial materials (some examples are listed in the TEI Tutorials pages). With the publication of TEI P4, the XML version of the TEI Guidelines, which uses the generation of TEI Lite as an example of the Modification mechanism built into the TEI Guidelines, the opportunity has been taken to produce a lightly revised version of the present document. This revision documents the XML version of the TEI Lite DTD. Lou Burnard, May 2002

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