TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange
Creators: name: TEI Consortium
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: Text Encoding
Digital Humanities
Text Encoding Initiative

description: Release 4.9.0 is codenamed ‘The Atocha Release’.

This release introduces new features and resolves a number of issues raised by the TEI community. 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 4.9.0 milestone. Many thanks to the community contributors who reported issues, sent bug fixes, and helped with the drafting that led to this release, including: Piotr Bański, Gerrit Brüning, Lou Burnard, Hugh Cayless, James Cummings, Stefan Dumont, Tomaž Erjavec, Janelle Jenstad, Katarzyna Kapitan, David Maus, Emami Mohsen, Kiyonori Nagasaki, Klaus Rettinghaus, Peter Stadler, and Christian Thomas.

The following changes are particularly worth highlighting in this release:

New encoding features



A new constraintDecl element provides a way for TEI ODDs to specify their Schematron query language binding (#2330, PR #2594, and #2660.


 

Changes to content models



With this release, bibl, biblFull, and biblStruct are now members of att.canonical, permitting the ref attribute on these elements. Examples and explanation have been added to the Core Elements chapter to clarify when it is best to use the attributes ref vs. key on these elements (#2392 and PR #2655).

In response to several different requests from the community, the place attribute is now available on div, postscript, sp, and speaker for use in describing where these appear in the source document. Additionally, the attribute class att.placement has been added to att.transcriptional, making the place attribute more widely available on del, delSpan, mod, redo, restore, retrace, subst, substJoin, and undo. See (#2528, #2542, #2551, #2572, and PR #2665).

The hand attribute is now available on emph and dateline (#2550, PR #2587, and PR #2644).

The language element within profileDesc may now have a scope attribute to indicate how much a language is used in the document (#2516 and PR #2631).

The datatype of the reason attribute is now defined consistently as teidata.enumerated on each of these elements: gap, secl, supplied, and surplus (#2580 and PR #2581).

The xenoData element now permits more than one child element, when previously it was allowed only one (PR #2584).

elementRef is now constrained to prevent duplication in an ODD schema specification and to prevent the use of source, since an element reference in a content model must be locally defined (#2543 and PR 2552).


 

Changes to classes



The att.transcriptional class now includes att.placement (PR #2665).


The following changes introduced with this release could invalidate ODD customizations in TEI projects. Those maintaining ODD customizations of the TEI should be aware of the following changes, and may need to adapt their ODD files accordingly.

ODD-breaking changes and deprecation



Due to the addition of att.placement to att.transcriptional, an ODD customization that attempts to remove the class att.placement from the elements add, addSpan, and rt may not work to remove the place attribute in this version of the Guidelines. The ODD customizer seeking to remove place from these elements is advised to remove the attribute rather than the class.

Following a deprecation period that has now ended, the calendar attribute has been removed from att.datable elements in the TEI Lite, Tite, and JTEI ODD files maintained by the TEI (PR #2615).


Improvements of prose and examples



The explanation of XML schema validity has been modified in the Namespaces section of A Gentle Introduction to XML. (#2626 and PR #2627).

The explanation and examples of Schematron are significantly updated, and an incomplete example of the ptr element has been repaired in the Documentation Elements chapter (#2179, PR #2589, #2060, and PR #2635).

The remarks on TEI and teiCorpus have been updated in English and Spanish to better explain why and how to specify the namespace on these elements (#2621 and PR #2632).

The gloss and description of msName are revised (#2434 and PR #2645).

Among the values for datum on the geoDecl element, the description of the value ‘MGRS’ (Military Grid Reference System) is fully revised (#2464).

The table of TEI modules in The TEI Infrastructure chapter had been missing information, but is now updated and reorganized by order of chapters for ease of reference (#2617 and PR #2618).

Remarks about the attributes target and cRef were previously available only in the specification for ref but not ptr. They have now been added to the specification for ptr (#2210 and PR #2646).


 

Housekeeping



The style of the Guidelines has been modified to match that of the new TEI website (PR #2566).

The Guidelines CSS has also been updated to modify the positioning of superscript text (Stylesheets #718 and PR #2636) and to remove empty links to the Bibliography in popup footnotes and bibliography when no source is specified (PR #2656).

Double hyphens have been revised to em dashes throughout the Guidelines (#2155).

TEI element specifications now consistently list attributes in alphabetical order (PR #2562).

Descriptions of models, elements, and attributes across the TEI coding specifications now end consistently with a period. (PR #2578).

Each figure, table, and egXML element in the Guidelines now has an xml:id, and newly added distinct identifiers follow a consistent format (PR 2604).

The xml:lang attribute is now added to define the language of all constraintSpec elements in the Guidelines (#2608 and PR #2610).

Attribute class memberships in TEI element specifications are now consistently organized to list att.global memberships first, followed by other classes in alphabetical order (#2463).

Superfluous space has been removed from the content of specGrp in all Guidelines chapter files (PR #2576).


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 7.58.0 milestone.