[tei-council] 2.0 release notes

[Lou Burnard]

I've just checked into the P5 repository a preliminary draft for the 
release notice to go out with release 2.0 of TEI P5, due real soon now. 
I just picked out a few of what I see as the key developments, and would 
much welcome suggestions for things I've overlooked or misrepresented.

The authoritative version is at P5/ReleaseNotes/readme-2.0.xml and it 
looks like this:

This is a major new release of the P5 Guidelines, which introduces some 
significant new material as well as implementing an unusually large set 
of other changes and error corrections. Since the last release in March 
2011, members of the TEI community have proposed over 60 feature 
requests and reported about the same number of errors; dealing with 
these has kept the TEI Council busy, and most of these tickets have now 
been closed. Discussion of each modification and each action taken is 
available on the relevant sourceforge ticket, which is also referenced 
in the change log, as usual.

We mention here just a few of the more notable changes in this release:

1 Several new elements have been introduced to facilitate a more 
"document-focussed" (as opposed to "text-focussed") way of working. A 
new document element can now be used to organize digital images of a 
source document in much the same way as the existing facsimile, but with 
the added ability to embed detailed source transcriptions of the source 
within the same structure. A number of other elements have been added or 
modified to support the detailed encoding of transcriptions of 
individual documents, and a mechanism has been defined for the encoder 
to represent the evolution of a text through various writing stages. The 
existing chapter on Physical Transcription has been exhaustively revised 
to cater for these revisions which will, it is hoped, go some way to 
improve the support offered by the TEI scheme for documentary and 
genetic editing.

2. The licensing conditions applicable to TEI products were made more 
explicit and evident; the source code tree was tidied up, with all 
unused items being moved out; some old annoyances -- notably the 
meaningless distinction between "mwa" and "opt" -- were removed

3 A new notatedMusic element was added to support representation of 
musical notation within texts in a way compatible with the existing 
Music XML standard.

4. A number of minor changes were made to make it possible to represent 
dates, and normalised dates, using non-Julian calendar systems; a new 
attribute class was defined to facilitate provision of sort keys.

5. Several modifications were made to enhance the representation of more 
carefully structured or richer bibliographic entries, notably the 
ability to nest one bibl within another, and the ability to specify a 
work's language.

6. All examples were revised to drastically reduce the amount of 
unnecessarily divergent and encoding practices (such as the values used 
for the @rend attribute, or for language identifier codes)

7. The content models of some elements were relaxed in light of the 
experience of converting ECCO to TEI P5, to permit for example stage 
directions within verse, or verse within headings.

As far as possible, and in line with stated policy, none of the changes 
made at this release should invalidate existing documents. Rather than 
simply removing features or practices which are now considered 
erroneous, care has been taken to indicate that such features are 
deprecated and may be removed at a subsequent release. Work is ongoing 
on how exactly to formalise this policy.