Building TEI DTDs and Schemas on demand

Conference item

The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines provide generic but detailed recommendations for the mark-up of electronic documents, in particular texts from the literary and linguistic domains. The TEI guidelines, converted to XML in 2001, are maintained in a high-level markup which mixes elements combination and content model rules with text documentation. A project to convert this to use RelaxNG internally was described at XML Europe 2002. Because the TEI is modular and extensible, it is accompanied by a web application which assists the user to define a subset and/or extension of the schema and creates an ad hoc DTD. This paper describes a new version of the program, which will enable users to generate DTDs, RelaxNG schemas, and W3C schemas on demand according to their specification, along with instance documentation. The application, named Roma (the previous DTD-only incarnation was called Carthage), lets the user choose which TEI modules are needed, and allows them to include or exclude elements individually. It also supports the modification of existing elements, and the definition of new elements, with appropriate changes to TEI model classes. Standard components from other namespaces (SVG and MathML) can be included. Most of this can be done without commitment to which of the output formats is desired. At the end a ‘flattened’ schema or DTD is produced, containing only the necessary elements.

Authors: Rahtz, S

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: XML Europe
• Host title: XML Europe
• Publication date: 2003-01-01