This version of the TEI Guidelines introduces new features and resolves a number of issues raised by the TEI community. As always, the majority of these changes and corrections are a consequence of feature requests or bugs reported by the TEI community using the SourceForge tracking system. If you find something you think needs to change in the TEI Guidelines, schemas, tools, or website, please submit a feature request or bug ticket at http://tei.sf.net/ for consideration. Lists of closed bugs and closed feature requests are available on the site.
Some of the more noticeable changes in this release include:
- Footnotes in the Guidelines now appear in a popup box when you click on them, rather than causing a jump to the bottom of the page. (This function depends on JavaScript; if you have JS turned off, the old behaviour will still work.)
- The prose restriction that the <pubPlace>, <address>, <idno>, <availability>, and <date> children of <publicationStmt> occur in that order has been removed.
- The content model of <publicationStmt> has been updated to reflect the restrictions detailed in the prose of section 2.2.4 Publication, Distribution, Licensing, etc.. For more information on this please see http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/PublicationStmt-Changes.
- <stage> now claims membership of att.placement (and thus gets the @place attribute) as per https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/476/.
- <docDate> is now available as a child of <dateLine> (https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/472/), and the content models of <signed> and <salute> have been loosened (https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/433/; https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/478/) to allow more flexibility in the ‘top’ ‘tail’ of sections (prompted by experience in EEBO TCP)
- <l> is now allowed in the <trailer>
- Usage of @corresp has been clarified (https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/bugs/506/).
- The value of the @matchPattern attribute is now defined as W3C XPath syntax rather than W3C XML Schema Language (https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/432/). This allows for more powerful regular expressions.
- @perf on <tech> now has the datatype 1+ data.pointer, instead of data.enumerated (http://sourceforge.net/p/tei/bugs/524/).
- Support for ‘pure ODD’: it is now possible to define content models using TEI XML constructs only, as an alternative to the use of RELAX NG. This change is discussed further in a paper by Burnard and Rahtz presented at 2013's ACM Document Engineering conference. Support for the new syntax in ODD processing scripts is incomplete, however, and not yet fully tested.
- Use of the element <valDesc> throughout the TEI specifications code was rationalised: mostly this involved removal of redundant commentary, but in some cases element or attribute descriptions have been extended or modified.
- A new <abstract> element has been added to support descriptive metadata about a ‘born-digital’ item (such as a journal article in a review) to be stored in the TEI Header per https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/471
- @name has been made optional (previously required) on <relation> as per https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/467/ since a Schematron test is in place to check whether one of @name, @ref, or @key is available.
- <forest> and <forestGrp>, <colloc> and others are examples of elements which used to have locally-declared @type attributes which benefit from the ability to now modify class-provided attributes locally to the element. They now claim membership of att.typed (and thus get @type and @subtype attributes). Similarly <desc> is now also a member of att.typed as per https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/473/.
- The <s> element has been modified to not allow it to self-nest as per https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/bugs/578
There are also some changes to the way the Council is managing the Guidelines:
- Pre-release versions of the TEI P5 development tree are now tagged as ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ in their version information.
- In preparation for a program to get translations of reference documentation up to date, all <desc> and <gloss> elements have been dated. This allows us to easily generate lists of translated blocks which need revising.
- More examples were added or corrected in this release and improvements to the overall way examples are maintained is under consideration by the TEI Technical Council.
In addition, the XSL stylesheets which provide processing of TEI ODD files for Roma and OxGarage have been updated, notably providing better support for multi-namespace ODD. The Stylesheets are being maintained separately from the Guidelines and are at https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets.