
From lou.burnard@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk Tue Jul 31 17:22:07 2001
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 17:12:54 +0100 (BST)
From: Lou Burnard <lou.burnard@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
Reply-To: tei-trans@lists.village.virginia.edu
To: tei-trans@lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Draft press release (fwd)


Steve and I propose to saturate the airwaves with something like the
following. We are also about to post a shorter snappier more specific
version soliciting helpful reviewers to tei-l. Any comments?

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 Lou Burnard                           http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou      
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The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C) today announced 
release of the official review draft of version 4 of Guidelines
for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. The third edition,
known as "P3", has been heavily used since its released in April of
1994 for developing richly encoded and highly portable electronic
editions of major works in philosophy, linguistics, history, literary
studies, and many other disciplines.

The fourth edition, "P4" will be fully compatible with XML, as well as
remaining compatible with SGML (XML's predecessor and the syntactic basis
for P3).  XML-compatible versions of the TEI DTDs have been available for
some time by means of an automatic generation process using the TEI "pizza
chef" on the project's website at http://www.tei-c.org/pizza.html. The
first stage in the production of P4 has been to remove the need for this
process; accordingly, a preliminary set of dual-capability XML or SGML
DTDs was made available for testing at the ACH-ALLC Conference in New York
in June (now available from http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/DTD/). The next stage
was to apply a series of systematic changes to the associated
documentation, which is now complete: the results may be read at
http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/index.html

Over the summer, it is planned to carry out a complete review of this
text, aiming to treat XML equally with SGML throughout. Detailed work is
required to revise the treatment of character sets and writing systems, as
well as in rewriting the chapter "A Gentle Introduction to SGML", and is
already underway. 

The TEI Consortium solicits assistance in the review of all other parts of
the new draft. For information on how you can participate in this review,
please go to http://www.tei-c.org/TEI/P4X/Review/

Comments are due to the editors by mid-September, and it is hoped to
complete the first publication of the new draft in time for the first TEI
Members Meeting scheduled for November of this year.

The TEI Consortium is a non-profit membership organisation, set up to
maintain and develop the TEI Guidelines. The TEI Guidelines are an
international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries,
museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of
literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using
an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally
obsolescent. The Consortium has executive offices in Bergen, Norway,
and hosts at the University of Bergen, Brown University, Oxford
University, and the University of Virginia, with Lou Burnard (of
Oxford) as European editor, and Steve DeRose (of Brown) as North
American Editor.

More information is available from info@tei-c.org, or TEI Executive
Office, The HIT Centre, Allgaten 27, N-5007 Bergen, Norway,
telephone +47 55 58 29 54.


