4. Addressing mechanisms

The TEI DTD defines sophisticated pointer types to overcome the limitations imposed by SGML's ID/IDREF mechanism (see [7, § 3.1.2.1.6] ). We present the two main types of pointers defined by the TEI DTD, followed by the addressing system that underpins the operation of these pointers.

Our separate treatment of this aspect of TEI is justified by the fact that TEI's hypertextual mechanisms have largely influenced emerging techniques such as XML (the XML recommendation recently adopted by the W3 consortium, see [7, § 3.5.2] ).