Attached is  a press release about  the current status  of the ongoing
revision of  TEI P3, which  is about to  be circulated widely,  and will
also be available from http://www.tei-c.org/News/

For readers of this list, and other friends, we'd like to draw your
particular attention to our urgent need for assistance in the revision
process. We have a 1500 page specification which has been subjected a
range of automatic and semi-automatic updating procedures over the
last few weeks to get it into good shape. We now need to read
carefully through the results to identify and fix errors of the
following kinds:

* stupidities introduced during the conversion procedures

* examples which have become irrelevant or inappropriate because of
the change to XML

* cases where XML and SGML usages differ significantly and need more
discussion

* specific usage recommendations which need to be revised because they
assume an SGML processing environment

* typos, illiteracies, and other stupidities which have been there all
along but which we missed the last time/s around

The TEI editors need your help! We have no hope of doing all of the
above in the time available, if (as we do) we also hope to distribute
a new draft at the first TEI members meeting this November.

Hence the present call for volunteers. Last time we tried this
(shortly before the publication of P3) it worked very well -- over a
dozen people or groups piled in comments which enormously enhanced the
quality of the published P3 as well as saving its editors intense
embarassment. This time round, the community is bigger and the amount
of error (maybe) smaller... Please, therefore, choose a chapter you'd
like to review and drop us a note of your intention to do so. 

We're maintaining a website with a list of the state of play for each
chapter: see http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/Status/ for chapters still up
for grabs.

NOTE: dropDeadline for comments is 20 September 2001 (we need at least
a month to apply corrections and produce the new version) but the
sooner you get them in the better.

ANOTHER NOTE: If you identify sections or topics which need major
change or completely rewriting, areas on which P4 is completely
silent, or on which it says far too much for today's taste -- tell us,
but remember that the goal of the present exercise is revision and
correction, not a completely new document!

FINAL NOTE: If you're revising a chapter which discusses a particular
tagset, please remember that you should also check out the tag
documentation for all the elements discussed in that chapter. In
particular, if you have time, we'd really like suggestions for (real
life, not made up) examples to add to tagdocs which lack
them. However, we're not expecting anyone to sit and read through all
the tagdocs...

Lou Burnard
Steve DeRose

editors@tei-c.org

