The Text Encoding Initiative and the Extensible Markup Language

CELT uses XML markup according to the TEI Guidelines to produce electronic documents that guarantee scholarly integrity, and are independent of any specific proprietary software or platform. The TEI Guidelines, manual and extensive supporting information are available on the Text Encoding Initiative homepage.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a proper subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language: ISO 8879), a markup method for encoding documents in a non-proprietary way. XML is used extensively by corporations, institutions, and governmental departments world-wide, and is particularly suited to large volumes of documentation which need to be electronically searchable and manipulable. ISO 8879 was formulated in 1986 in response to the need to develop a non-proprietary standard for encoding.

The TEI was established at an international planning meeting on text encoding standards in November 1987. The TEI is sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, the European Association for Digital Humanities, and other organisations. The TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange were published in spring of 1994. They provide an extensive scheme, orignially SGML but now XML, for encoding electronic texts across a wide spectrum of text types and suitable for any kind of application, but with particular application to the encoding of literary, historical, and other types of texts common in Humanities research. The Guidelines have achieved wide-scale implementation in projects throughout the world.

• The XML/SGML Web Page: Information on how SGML/XML are used with links for software, users and much more. 
• XML/SGML Bibliography 
• Robin Cover's List of SGML/XML Discussion Groups and Mailing Lists
• TEI by Example
• Peter Flynn's XML FAQ 
• Lou Burnard's and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen's Introduction to TEI Tagging (An Excerpt) 
• Projects using TEI