A TEI Customization for Writing TEI Customizations

Abstract

A schema, in general, is intended to be used to check a document for errors before those errors cause problems in processing. However, schemas can also help us write our documents. The TEI ODD language (and the more modern version thereof, Pure ODD), in particular, can be used for two related but distinctly dierent purposes: 1) to create a markup language, including documentation and schemas; and 2) to customize a markup language that was already written in ODD. There are several examples of (1), including the TEI Guidelines, the Music Encoding Initiative, the ISO Feature Structure encoding system, and the W3C Internationalization Tag Set. And there are several well known examples of (2), including TEI Lite, TEI Tite, TEI Simple Print, Comic Book Markup Language, Digital Humanities Quarterly, TEI-in-Libraries, and the markup language for this journal. 1 Of all these various uses of the TEI ODD language, the most common (by far) is to create a customized TEI for use in a particular project. This is because the TEI Guidelines are not meant to be used out of the box-every TEI project is expected to customize the TEI. For example, in raw

Using ODD for HTML

“…Good praxis also requires documentation of the rules, along with encoding guidelines and examples. ODD is the perfect choice for this (Bauman 2019;Romary and Riondet 2018). ODD les, being TEI les, are also easily processable, a very useful feature whose value will become apparent below.…”

“…Although ODD (One Document Does it all) is a feature of the TEI language, and used primarily for creating TEI schemas, ODD in fact "goes beyond this to provide a generic tool for the documentation and management of any XML encoding scheme, not necessarily one based on the TEI" (Burnard and Rahtz 2014). Syd Bauman (2019) points out that the TEI ODD language "can be used for two related but distinctly dierent purposes: (1) to create a markup language, including documentation and schemas; and (2) to customize a markup language that was already written in ODD." This paper describes a use case which does not quite fall into either of those categories: the use of ODD to create and document a highly constrained customization of a markup language not originally written in ODD.…”