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 (HTML) or
http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/reviewdraft.pdf (PDF)

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/Status/

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.