ReasonsToUseTEI

This is a quick summary of reasons to use TEI

• No 'Tag Soup.' Many generators of HTML generate an apparently random collection of tags to get a fragment of content to look as expected in a particular context, but when taken out of this context the tags are essentially useless. TEI prevents this from happening by defining legal occurrence scenarios of all tags, and providing rigorous tools check that the XML is valid. Presentation is handled by tools such as CSS, which was designed to handle presentation

• Defined Semantics. Whereas HTML defines hold text should look with tags such as and , TEI defines what the content of the tag is, or what it means with tags such as <author/> and <opener/>.

• Community of Practice The TEI community practice builds on best-practice in the field of humanities computing to enable members to be at the forefront of the digital humanities

• Representation of non-Unicode characters While many text-oriented systems struggle with the full range of Unicode characters and features, TEI goes beyond Unicode to support arbitrary characters using the <glyph> tag

• Rending the HTML or PDF easy rendering to PDF or HTML allows easy user access without the need for plugins, adaptors or fuss.