These XML guidelines are an evolving document, written initially for in-house use at the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center and offered publicly to be a help for others embarking on Text Encoding Initiative text production. This draft previously referred to the SGML TEILITE.DTD but now refer to its XML counterpart, the TEIXLITE.DTD, a subset of the TEI tagset.

These guidelines cover not only tags and their usage, but offer suggestions on the processing of electronic texts and related images. The guidelines assume that the text in question is already in some electronic format; information on OCR scanning is available elsewhere in the Etext Center cluster of WWW documents.