A member of the TEI Council recently pointed out that subscribers to the
TEI list might reasonably be expected to have an interest in what was
currently being planned for the next major release of the TEI Guidelines
-- P5, which is rumoured to appear in some form next year. Council
members and attendees at the TEI annual members meetings have of course
been regularly briefed about this, as the half-baked notions of editors
and workgroups have assumed a more solid consistency over the last year
or two, but the wider TEI community represented by the readership of
this list almost certainly has cause to feel under-informed on the
topic. For which, apologies!

This posting is intended to be the first of several introducing some of
the new ideas being discussed for P5. I say "some" because getting a
synoptic view is still quite difficult -- some ideas are only just
beginning to crystalize, while others are really quite solid, and I tend
to worry more about the former than the latter.

Here's one thing about which there is no doubt though: EVERY DOCUMENT
WHICH CONFORMS TO TEI P4 IS IPSO FACTO b r o k e n IN P5.

Why?

* Because at P5 we are renaming the root element of a TEI conformant
document from <TEI.2> to <TEI>. Cowardice has held us back from taking
this radical step ever since the publication of TEI P2!

* Because at P5 we are moving more firmly into the heart country of XML.
That means amongst other things:

- we are using an XML schema language (Relax NG) to express the document
grammar defined by the TEI. It will also be expressed as an XML DTD, in
the way we know and love, but the abstract TEI model itself will become
a lot closer to schema-world. (If you want to read more about relaxng
there's a good tutorial at http://relaxng.org/tutorial-200011203.html)

- the Guidelines will define a TEI namespace. This means that all
existing XSLT stylesheets are broken. On the plus side, it means you can
use elements from other name spaces in your TEI documents. Anyone for
SVG? mathml?

What else is new? Well, the inner machinery is changing a lot. If you
have at last managed to get your head around the way that TEI P1 to P4
used parameter entities and other devious tricks to support its
modularity and extensibility -- we salute you! If you're one of those
who thought you'd rather wait for something a bit easier to understand
than the current chapters on those topics -- you were right!

There will be new content: there will be new chapters on character
encoding (how do I get a non-Unicode character into my Unicode file?) on
standoff and linking (anyone for xpointers?) on manuscript description
(ancient and modern) and on technical documentation (P5 will be the
first version of the Guidelines which documents itself!!). Some old
sores will be smoothed over and abolished (goodbye WSD) and some others
polished up for a bright new future (feature structures go ISO).

And we need your input on what else needs change. In a separate posting,
I will talk about the new mechanisms set up for gathering and focussing
the wisdom of the TEI communities in order to ensure this revision meets
everyone's needs. I'll also start posting advance notice of some lower
level specifics here, as they start to take shape.

For the moment, if you want to dig deeper into what's going on in the
TEI -- check out the website. Under http://www.tei-c.org/Activities you
will find pages describing the current status of all current work groups
and related developments. Feel free to comment on what you find -- it's
your TEI!

Lou Burnard

p.s. For the latest plans for P5, including the timetable, see the
presentation we gave at the last members meeting:
www.tei-c.org/Members/2003-Nancy/Talks/rahtz.pdf