Major editions of the Guidelines have long been informally referred to by a name made up of the letter P (for Proposal) followed by a digit. The current release is one of the many releases of the fifth major edition of the Guidelines, known as P5. This attribute may be used to associate a TEI document with a specific release of the P5 Guidelines, in the absence of a more precise association provided by the source attribute on the associated schemaSpec.

This element is required. It is customary to specify the TEI namespace http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0 on it, using the xmlns attribute.

The <ab> element may be used at the encoder's discretion to mark any component-level elements in a text for which no other more specific appropriate markup is defined.

The type attribute is provided for the sake of those who wish to classify abbreviations at their point of occurrence; this may be useful in some circumstances, though usually the same abbreviation will have the same type in all occurrences. As the sample values make clear, abbreviations may be classified by the method used to construct them, the method of writing them, or the referent of the term abbreviated; the typology used is up to the encoder and should be carefully planned to meet the needs of the expected use. For a typology of Middle English abbreviations, see

If abbreviations are expanded silently, this practice should be documented in the <editorialDecl>, either with a <normalization> element or a <p>.

This element is intended only for cases where no abstract is available in the original source. Any abstract already present in the source document should be encoded as a <div> within the <front>, as it should for a born-digital document.

For more fine-grained description of participant activities during a spoken text, the <event> element should be used.

In a diplomatic edition attempting to represent an original source, the <add> element should not be used for additions to the current TEI electronic edition made by editors or encoders. In these cases, either the <corr> or <supplied> element are recommended.

In a TEI edition of a historical text with previous editorial emendations in which such additions or reconstructions are considered part of the source text, the use of <add> may be appropriate, dependent on the editorial philosophy of the project.

Both the beginning and the end of the added material must be marked; the beginning by the <addSpan> element itself, the end by the spanTo attribute.

Addresses may be encoded either as a sequence of lines, or using any sequence of component elements from the model.addrPart class. Other non-postal forms of address, such as telephone numbers or email, should not be included within an <address> element directly but may be wrapped within an <addrLine> if they form part of the printed address in some source text.

This element should be used for postal addresses only. Within it, the generic element <addrLine> may be used as an alternative to any of the more specialized elements available from the model.addrPart class, such as <street>, <postCode> etc.

If included, the name of an organization may be tagged using either the <name> element as above, or the more specific <orgName> element.

As with other culturally-constructed traits such as sex, the way in which this concept is described in different cultural contexts may vary. The normalizing attributes are provided as a means of simplifying that variety to Western European norms and should not be used where that is inappropriate. The content of the element may be used to describe the intended concept in more detail, using plain text.

Any number of alternations, pointers or extended pointers.