This document describes a bare-bones tag set taken from the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange published in 1994 by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The tags described have been chosen to serve as a simple introduction to the full markup scheme described in the Guidelines; they may suffice in some cases for the creation of simple electronic texts, but serious work will require a larger selection of the TEI tags. The reader is encouraged to use this document as a first introduction to TEI tagging, and to progress, after reading this document and using its tag set for a while, to a study of other TEI documentation, either the document called "TEI Lite: An Introduction to TEI Tagging" (document number TEI U5), or the full text of the Guidelines themselves (Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, document number TEI P3).
This document introduces the tags informally, with examples. As an incentive to learn the full TEI tag set, it mentions, from time to time, tags which are in the full tag set but have been omitted here to keep the bare-bones tag set simple. Such references may be ignored on first reading. Fuller discussion of all tags, and their formal descriptions in terms of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) may be found in the Guidelines.