The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange are the result of over six years' work by dozens of scholars from all over the world. As such, they represent a pioneer effort in an area where only occasional and isolated attempts were made before. They will certainly serve as the primary basis for encoding texts in electronic form for the foreseeable future.
The work of participants in the TEI not only involved consideration of problems of text encoding that are likely to be with us for decades to come, but also required the development of a methodology - from scratch - for approaching these problems. These pioneering efforts, while likely to be refined and extended, must not be lost: they provide the intellectual basis upon which text encoding practices will build in the future. This collection therefore documents the course of these efforts.
'The TEI Guidelines are extraordinary. Even if they were never adopted they would stand as a significant contribution to scholarship for their detailed analysis of the information sets of a huge range of complex text types.' From the Preface by Charles E. Goldfarb, inventor of the Standard Generalized Markup Language.