3. Introducing the TEI DTD

3.1 Introduction

The TEI DTD is very large (over 400 elements), very well documented and very modular. The authors of the TEI DTD have made maximum use of the syntactic possibilities offered by SGML.

The originality of this DTD is largely due to the circumstances in which it was conceived. It had to take into account the coding needs expressed by communities of researchers with very varied concerns. The documents that these communities wished to encode in a standardized way had an inherent structure that was often rich and complex. What's more, the interpretations associated with these documents were not intended to remain static, but should be able to evolve easily to take account of advances in research.

Taking these constraints into...