TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange

Release 4.5.0 is codenamed ‘The Release of One’s Own’.

This release introduces new features and resolves a number of issues raised by the TEI community. As always, the majority of these changes and corrections are a consequence of feature requests or bugs reported by the TEI community using the GitHub tracking system. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 4.5.0 milestone.

The following changes are particularly worth highlighting in this release: 

New encoding features

• Sex and gender have been revised in the Guidelines (#2189, #2190), this includes 
  • The introduction of the new element gender specifying the gender identity of a person, persona, or character.
  • The introduction of the new datatype teidata.gender defining the range of attribute values used to represent the gender of a person, persona, or character.
  • The revision of the discussion of traits and states in the subsection on Basic Principles.
  • Documentation and guidance in various places of Chapter 13 Names, Dates, People, and Places.
  • The revision of the elements sex, person, persona as well as the datatype teidata.sex.
• The Guidelines now allow for nested ab elements (#1856). The changes include
  • The introduction of the new macro macro.abContent defining the content of anonymous block elements.
  • The introduction of the new element class model.paraPart that groups elements that may appear in paragraphs and similar elements.
  • Changing the content model for ab from macro.paraContent to macro.abContent.
  • The revision of the descriptions of paragraphs in the subsection on Paragraphs and of anonymous blocks in the subsection on Blocks, Segments, and Anchors.
  • Making model.gLike, model.global, model.inter, model.lLike, model.phrase, and lg members of the new element class model.paraPart.

Changes to content models

• With the introduction of model.describedResource the Guidelines and the data model for teiCorpus are now consistent (#1823).
• The content model of textLang has been changed from macro.phraseSeq to macro.specialPara (#2248).
• The measure element is now a member of the attribute class att.ranging, and examples have been added to demonstrate the use of attributes for encoding numerical ranges on measure (#2254).
• The constraint for the calendar attribute of att.datable has been broadened to flag as an error a date element which has a calendar attribute but has only whitespace content (#2257).
• The constraint for the location attribute in variantEncoding has been simplified (#2259).
• The listBibl element is now allowed as a child of abstract (#2292).
• A constraint has been added that requires that there is no text content within a zone or line element that is itself within a facsimile element (#2300).

Improvements of prose and examples

• A passage that incorrectly implied that figure is a member of the model.titlepagePart class has been re-written (#2228).
• The relationship between hand and handShift has been clarified (#2338).
• The outdated references to ISOCat have been updated in Chapter 9 Dictionaries, Chapter 18 Feature Structures, gram, and att.datcat. In the course of this the attributes datcat and valueDatcat have been removed from the dcr: namespace and are now native TEI attributes. Additionally, the targetDatcat attribute has been added to the attribute class att.datcat. This change is illustrated by examples in the sections mentioned.
• English glosses have been added to scriptDesc, transcriptionDesc, modelGrp, noteGrp, surfaceGrp, and att.declaring (PR #2308, PR #2302, PR #2293).
• A number of translations have been added, updated or improved (#2241, PR #2233, PR #2234, PR #2237, PR #2240, PR #2281, PR #2294, PR #2305, PR #2310, PR #2311, PR #2312, PR #2322, PR #2323, PR #2324, PR #2348).
• In addition, over a dozen typos, unclear expressions, and incorrect encodings have been corrected (#2222, #2289, PR #2351).

Documentation

• The documentation on Customizing TEI to Check Pointers by Syd Bauman has been published (1675).

Housekeeping

• The datatypes teidata.pointer, teidata.namespace, and teidata.namespaceOrName have been restricted so that they do not allow any whitespace in a URI (#2185).
• Improvements of the TEI encoding of examples have been made (#2314, #2297).
• The elements charName and glyphName have been removed from the tei_simplePrint exemplar ODD to align with the changes made in the 4.4.0 release (#2283).
• Some constraints in tei_customization have been removed now that the elements dataSpec and macroSpec allow at most one content or valList element (#2318).
• Misleading documentation for the prefix attribute of the elementSpec element has been removed (#2319).
• The schematron definition for reporting unused rendition definitions in jTEI articles has been improved (#PR 2325).
• Constraints on dataFacet and restriction have been made explicit in the dataRef element (#2326.
• The datatype teidata.unboundedInt has been renamed to teidata.unboundedCount (#2327).
• Missing ISO references have been added to the bibliography (PR #2344).
• The references to the ISO 8601 standard named in the att.datable.iso and teidata.temporal.iso have been updated with the version number 2004 (PR #2250).
• Vestigal declarations of the RelaxNG namespace have been removed (PR #2353).
• The values of the datatype teidata.outputMeasure have been updated to the latest CSS3 Candidate Recommendation (PR #2354).
• Various minor (but helpful) improvements have been made to our internal build process (#2267 and #551).

In addition, many improvements have been made to the XSLT stylesheets (which provide processing of TEI ODD files for Roma and TEIGarage as well as other TEI conversions). The Stylesheets are maintained separately from the Guidelines at https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 7.54.0 milestone.