[Corpora-List] Is the TEI a waste of time?

[Burnard Towers]

It is  not true that the issues addressed by TEI "are now non-issues because
XML handles them" . XML does not handle the same issues as the TEI.

The TEI provides you with a vocabulary of distinctions. XML gives you a
language to represent those distinctions, but does not itself define them. I
am somewhat surprised that a linguist doesn't see the difference!

It is however entirely true that the world in which the TEI vocabulary is
now used is quite different because of the wide spread  takeup of XML --
the availability of lots of systems which process XML actually makes TEI
more relevant today, rather than less, since *any* XML aware system can do
something with *any* TEI XML document. That's why standards are A Good
Thing.

In my (admittedly biassed) experience, as soon as people start trying to
make XML dtds for any serious work, they start to appreciate the value of
the work already carried out for them by the TEI. Wheels need not be
re-invented -- though they certainly need to be customized.

Lou

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no]On
> Behalf Of ak28
> Sent: 27 June 2003 12:24
> To: Christopher Brewster; corpora at uib.no
> Subject: RE: [Corpora-List] Is the TEI a waste of time?
>
>
> Christopher Brewster says:
>
> >1. Ignorance and confusion. [...] Does TEI do something
> >different from XML? Absurd question I know but that is the kind of
> >confusion which I suspect exists.
> >
>
> It is interesting to note that TEI's 1980s origins go back to the
> dark ages
> *before* SGML (XML's predecessor, for the really young) had taken
> hold as a
> standard.  So the original conception of TEI was to address
> issues that are
> now non-issues because XML handles them.  TEI's role, in a world
> with XML in
> it, is much harder to delineate than would have been the case had
> SGML and XML
> not taken hold.
>
> Adam Kilgarriff
>
>
>
>
>