A posting from Lou Burnard (Oxford Computing Services) announces the release of an updated TEI 'PizzaChef' tool, accessible online from the TEI Consortium websites at the University of Virginia and Oxford University. The updated tool uses the P4 XML Edition DTD modules from the TEI Guidelines and produces only XML DTDs. Using a baking metaphor, the PizzaChef tool enables the designer to create a personalized TEI-conformant document type definition (DTD) simply by clicking radio buttons and check-boxes. "The TEI Guidelines define several hundred elements and associated attributes, which can be combined to make many different DTDs, suitable for many different purposes, either simple or complex. With the aid of the PizzaChef, you can build a DTD that contains just the elements you want, suitable for use with any XML processing system." The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines themselves support SGML and XML, representing 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."

On TEI P4 XML Edition: "The primary goal of the P4 revision has been to make available a new and corrected version of the TEI Guidelines which: (1) is expressed in XML and conforms to a TEI-conformant XML DTD; (2) generates a set of DTD fragments that can be combined together to form either SGML or XML document type definitions; (3) corrects blatant errors, typographical mishaps, and other egregious editorial oversights; (4) can be processed and maintained using readily available XML tools instead of the special-purpose ad hoc software originally used for TEI P3. A second major design goal of this revision has been to ensure that the DTD fragments generated would not break existing documents: in other words, that any document conforming to the original TEI P3 SGML DTD would also conform to the new XML version of it. Although full backwards compatibility cannot be guaranteed, we believe our implementation is consistent with that goal."

"The TEI began as a research effort cooperatively organized by three scholarly societies (the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing), and funded solely by substantial research grants from the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the European Union, the Canadian Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and others."