Taco Hoekwater
But the few times I've had to work with TEI stuff I found that you can easily get much more than you bargained for. Bibliographic data is not easy on its own, and a format that allows (almost promotes) extra tags to be embedded also is not helping at all.
... MODS has some of these issues too. Consider these are both valid: <name type="personal"> <namePart>Jane Doe</namePart> <role> <roleTerm type="text">creator</roleTerm> </role> </name> <name type="personal"> <namePart type="given">Jane</namePart> <namePart type="family">Doe</namePart> <role> <roleTerm type="text">creator</roleTerm> </role> </name> So in many formats there's a balance between flexibility and brevity/predictability. FWIW, I've just settled on RDF for my own data needs between it provides the formal rigor of relational databases (that XML per se lacks), but much more flexibility. But as I said in the previous note, I don't think the data format has to matter that much to formatting software (at its core that is). Bruce