TEI Recommended Practice

TEI Recommended Practice (TRP) refers to adhering to certain guidelines which are not strictly enforced by a schema, but which are recommended by the official Guidelines.

This page aims to contain a listing of such practices in one place, so one may check whether their own documents adhere to the recommended practice. Below will include a listing of such items, including also those mentioned in the guidelines as being recommended, without their necessarily categorizing the recommendation as TRP. The "optional" groupings on the Reference pages (whether the presence of an attribute or a predefined listing of values) might be too numerous to include here, except to list all such elements or attribute groups which have such recommendations.

(By the way, does this wiki take advantage of 'interwiki' links to link page to specific page using shortcuts?)

I am beginning with a listing of the recommendations by chapter (searching them for any mention of 'recommend' in case others wish to help follow the pattern), but perhaps some other grouping can be done.

Besides officially recommended practice, while there are no official means of indicating within a TEI document a particular schema, etc. used by a TEI document (besides a clue given by <TEI>'s @version), third party conventions might be used to suggest customizations for certain domains or purposes (e.g., for an already TEI conformant document, a customization might indicate the expansion or constriction of TEI suggested optional attribute values).

By chapter

Chapter 1

1. Provide explicitly or by reference a TEI schema specification against which the document may be validated.
2. Include at least these modules: tei, header, core, textstructure
3. Indicate all language shifts in the source, explicitly by use of xml:lang

Chapter 2

1. Title for an electronic work should be derived from the existing source text's title, yet distinguishable from it (e.g., adding 'an electronic transcription’ or ‘a digital edition’).
2. The file names used to store on disk ought not be used as the <title> for any electronic work
3. Use an <editionStmt>
4. Use standard abbreviations for units of quantity: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
5. Use Arabic numerals separated by punctuation (e.g., 6.19.33) when using <idno>
6. <encodingDesc> is highly recommended
7. When including <tagUsage> elements, provide <namespace> and <tagUsage> elements for each distinct element and namespace used in the text (with @occurs, if used, matching number of corresponding elements in the document).
8. For automatic processing, a canonical reference system should not be expressed by a mere prose description.
9. Wherever possible, the content of <keywords> should be taken from a recognized source (e.g., British Library/Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data for printed books, or a published thesaurus appropriate to the field)
10. <revisionDesc> is highly recommended
11. <revisionDesc> to indicate significant changes in the header (besides <revisionDesc> itself) as well as text, at least indicating the date of creation of the header.
12. For <revisionDesc>, Give changes in reverse chronological order, most recent first
13. See section 2.6 for a header, expanded to include additionally recommended information, adequate to most bibliographic purposes, in particular to allow for the creation of an AACR2-conformant bibliographic record. (?)
14. For <respStmt><name>, give all names in the form in which the persons or bodies wish to be publicly cited. This would usually be the fullest form of the name, including first names. Agencies compiling catalogues of machine-readable files are recommended to use available authority lists, such as the Library of Congress Name Authority List, for all common personal names.

Chapter 3

1. Use elements for highlighting (?)
2. Where possible, encode textual feature marked by highlighting, rather than just the fact of highlighting
3. In some contexts (e.g. bibliographic citations), the encoding of dates is recommended or required rather than optional.
4. <figure>, <graphic>, or <binaryObject> for encoding graphics
5. When a text has no pre-existing associated reference system of any kind, at a minimum, mark the page boundaries of the source text using methods discussed in this section.
6. Retain page breaks for texts which have a detailed reference system of their own.
7. Use the TEI header to declare whether standard references are recorded in the @n or @xml:id attributes and which elements may carry standard references or portions of them
8. Describe reference system in <refsDecl>, ideally <cRefPattern>
9. Within <analytic>, all forms of the title ought to be given together
10. Do not use highlighting mechanisms to indicate the way in which a spoken text is performed (e.g., the voice quality, loudness, etc.)--use <shift/> instead