The text encoding initiative: Flexible and extensible document encoding

Abstract

The Text Encoding Initiative is an international collaboration aimed at producing a common encoding scheme for complex texts. The diversity of the texts used by members of the communities served by the project led to a large specification, but the specification is structured to facilitate understanding and use. The requirement for generality is sometimes in tension with the requirement to handle specialized text types. The texts that are encoded often can be viewed or interpreted in several different ways. While many electronic documents can be encoded in very simple ways, some documents and some users will tax the limits of any fixed scheme, so a flexible extensible encoding is required to support research and to facilitate the reuse of texts.