How to Read the Manual

General Remarks

If this is the first time you are visiting this website (or even reading our Encoding Manual in general), it might be a good idea to start off by reading our General Remarks pages. The first three of those (First Things First: Markup, Elements and Tags, and Attributes and Their Values) offer some very basic information on (TEI-)XML in general, while the last three (Special Case: @xml:id, Entities, and Spacing) each discuss a specific feature of (our) encoding in more detail.

Specific Tags

If you are interested in a specific element, you can try navigating your way to its description by entering its name in the search bar (in the sidebar on the righthand side of each page). Or, if you know whether it's an element that either belongs in The Header or in The Text, you can navigate your way to either one of those pages, and find their respective elements presented in a tree-like structure in the sidebar on your right, that tells you on which level you would be most likely to find that element. In The Text section, this tree-like structure displays all of the tags we use in the <text> element. The Header section works a little differently, as it is subdivided into the <teiHeader>'s three major modules (one of which is subdivided into three submodules). Each of these (sub)modules contains more detailed information on all of the tags that can be used within those modules.

Code

As you may already have noticed in the above, when elements, attributes, entities, small snippets of code etc. are mentioned in the text, they are rendered in red with a grey background like this: <element> @attribute #&entity;. We are currently in the process of linking the elements that are mentioned in the text to their individual tag descriptions, so you can click on them for an even faster navigation experience. When this process is finished, we will let you know through the News and Updates page.

Larger strings of code are separated from the text itself (like you would a <blockquote>), put inside a blue panel, and rendered with syntax highlights. Although we try to make these strings of code as readable as possible by using hard returns and spacing to indicate element nesting, they may not fit inside the panel, depending on your screen size. In that case, you can always scroll the panel horizontally to read the rest of the code, as in the following example:

Validation information

Each tag description starts with a table that contains the element's validation information. This table should speak for itself: in the XML transcription of the text, the element has to be a direct child of one of the tags in the Contained by row, and can only have those elements in the May Contain row as its direct children. To find out why this is the case (and what are child or parent tags in the first place), please read the Validation section of the Elements and Tags page. The last row of the table contains the attributes the element may have, with obligatory attributes rendered in blue, and optional attributes rendered in black.

Other information

The rest of the tag description gives you more information about the element itself. The first part, titled 'What is it?' will give you a short description of what the element stands for, and how we use it. If the element in question has any attributes, they will be listed under the next heading, titled 'Attributes'. This section is subdivided into different 'tabs',  each of which explains the use of one of the element's attributes, like this:

You can read the description of each of these attributes by clicking on the relevant tab. If there is anything else you need to know about the element you're researching, you will find it listed below the attribute description.