Jon Noring wrote:
Well, my investigation into PG-TEI and TEI-P4X (thank heavens for TEI Pizza Chef to flatten the otherwise unreadable TEI-P4 DTD!) shows it is also a real possibility. But I believe, subject to change as I learn more from the experts here and the TEI-L folk, that in order to make PGTEI+CSS2 to render in web standards browsers (limited now to Firefox and maybe Opera 8) we also have to appropriately constrain/subset the PG-TEI vocabulary (allowed elements/attributes/attr-values) and content models (what results may be somewhat like TEI-Lite, but not exactly the same -- we can certainly add our own tags as needs require.) We may also have to give up a couple things.
You can render XML, using XSLT + CSS in Firefox and IE, for a small demo, look at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11335/11335-x/11335-x.xml. This sample still has a few rough edges, but can be made more beautiful. The XSLT is simply pulled in by the browser. For any TEI file to work in an actual environment, you need to have a set of working instructions and conventions, such as what to put in rend attributes, and how to interpret certain things. TEI is mainly concerned about the semantics, but to render it, you need, even in a minimal way, also concern yourself about looks. Just some examples: I consider the foreign tag to imply no rendering information, only a language change. I will use <hi> with a lang (and rend) attribute to indicate a rendering change as well as a language change. If somebody applies italics to all foreign tags, it wont be as I intended it. Similarly, I consider quotation marks part of the text, and will leave them, even when I use <q> tags, and never emit quotation marks when rendering TEI. Another user may choose different. Some have argued (with valid reasons) that the entire idea of TEI markup is broken, and have proposed systems in which the mark-up is separated from the text (stream of characters), in such a way that multiple, parallel systems of mark-up can exist. Think of a separate (part of a) file, saying characters 21 to 34 are italics, and so on. This may sound odd, but it is the way the old Macintosh wordprocessor MacWrite worked. Jeroen.