A very very very short TEI documentSyd BaumanJulia Flanders
An unpublished document used for training.
No source: this electronic form is the original.
Encoding is pretty easy once you get started—it's just the bootstrapping process that's
difficult.
M. BaliseThe Ur-Encoder, 1987
Reflections on Text Encoding
When first learning about TEI encoding at the WWP, there are several things to bear in
mind: An encoding language that took 25 committees three years to
write should take one person about a month to learn.A natural language that took an entire civilization hundreds of
years to evolve is not going to be easily represented by an encoding language that
only took three years to write.Obscure texts by women are structured much the same as familiar
texts by men, except when they aren't.
Ode to the Encoder
I think that I shall never seeA poem as lovely as a treeAnd likewise we will never show 'emAn XML file as lovely as a poem.But if we try, we can conveyThe tree's loveliness, or that of a summer's dayIn verse, and if we tag it well,Also the poem's loveliness in the XML.
The schema was fiendishly roomyIt made the participants gloomy—To have no constraintMade the weaker ones faintAnd the stronger ones threatened to sue me.
Syd,an encoderThe Fool
Act 1
Scene 1
SydPacing anxiouslyTo tag, or not to tag, that is the questionWhether tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe chaos of the underencoded documentOr, by adding markup, to risk overtaggingAnd thereby fix the text. To tag, to parseTo parse—perchance to validate...Enter the Fool
Fools always speak in prose and they don't agonize about the cosmics of encoding
either.