As promised at the FTF, I've now added the following catechetical (sp?)
para at the start of the Simple doc following the first para.
~~~~
<p>Like every other TEI customization, TEI Simple was designed for use
with a particular type
of material. If the material you are planning to encode matches
the following criteria, then
TEI Simple is for you. If it does not, it may not be. <list>
<item>You are encoding print material, rather than manuscript
: Simple provides no way of
encoding manuscript features such as correction, deletion,
or scribal variation</item>
<item>You are encoding material from the Early Modern period
(i.e., up to the end of the
nineteenth century): some of the features for which Simple
provides encodings are rarely
found in modern materials.</item>
<item>You are encoding material written, broadly speaking,
within the Western European
tradition, using largely Western European characters.
Simple does provide facilities for
encoding short passages in non Western European languages,
but many features needed to
cope with Asian or ancient scripts are missing. </item>
<item>Your intention is to provide a relatively simple
encoding for a large amount of
material, rather than a rich encoding of a small amount of
material: Simple is intended
to help libraries and archives wishing to go beyond simple
digital facsimiles, rather
than support specialist research. It does not, for example,
include features for
detailed linguistic tagging beyond simple word-level
tagging, nor for specialised text
types such as dictionaries, historical or biographical
databases, etc. </item>
</list> If your needs go beyond those summarized here, Simple
may still be a good point of
departure, and may be very useful as a basis for the creation
of your own TEI customisation.
We don't however discuss the creation of a TEI customization in
this document: the TEI
website provides a number of links to tutorial material and
tools which may assist in this
process. </p>
~~~~
Magda, James, others: does this seem correct and complete?
