One co-author has argued¹ both that our encoding strategies must balance our desire for expressivity on the one hand against our desire for conformance and understandability on the other, and that while the TEI system deliberately makes it easy for documents to be interchangeable, it has made it all but impossible for generic TEI files to be interoperable.

One particularly important type of interoperability to consider, if not have, is the ability to write software that is able to do something useful (e.g., produce passable HTML output) from any valid input TEI file, i.e. from a generic TEI file rather than one that meets the criteria established by a particular customization.

While we do not think favoring interchangeability over interoperability is a bad thing (as we believe that, in general, the more we reach for interoperability the more we squelch expressivity and thus impair individual researchers), we do believe these decisions should be made deliberately, and that there may be cases in which TEI eschews interoperability for little or no benefit, in that particular TEI encodings make it harder to write software that processes generic TEI files.

In this presentation we will provide specific examples where the design of the TEI system makes writing generic software harder, some for little or no gain. We will further attempt to provide our thoughts, where applicable, on how a new TEI project might sidestep some of these issues; and for others suggest that TEI Council may wish to consider modifications to P5, or revamp how these issues are handled in P6.

Note

¹ See https://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Bauman01/BalisageVol7-Bauman01.html.