TEI editors Lou Burnard and Steve DeRose have announced the official release of version 4 draft Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. The third edition of the Guidelines known as 'P3' has been edited by participants in the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C); the third edition "has been heavily used since its released in April of 1994 for developing richly encoded and highly portable electronic editions of major works in philosophy, linguistics, history, literary studies, and many other disciplines. The fourth edition, 'P4' will be fully compatible with XML, as well as remaining compatible with SGML (XML's predecessor and the syntactic basis for P3). XML-compatible versions of the TEI DTDs have been available for some time by means of an automatic generation process using the TEI 'pizza chef' tool on the project's website. The first stage in the production of P4 has been to remove the need for this process; accordingly, a preliminary set of dual-capability XML or SGML DTDs was made available for testing at the ACH-ALLC Conference in New York in June. The next stage was to apply a series of systematic changes to the associated documentation, which is now complete: the results may be read online." The TEI editors invite participation in public review of the new P4 draft Guidelines.

"The TEI Consortium is a non-profit membership organisation, set up to maintain and develop the TEI Guidelines. The TEI Guidelines are an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent. The Consortium has executive offices in Bergen, Norway, and hosts at the University of Bergen, Brown University, Oxford University, and the University of Virginia, with Lou Burnard (of Oxford) as European editor, and Steve DeRose (of Brown) as North American Editor."