A very very very short TEI document Syd Bauman Julia Flanders

An unpublished document used for training.

No source: this electronic form is the original.
How to encode a simple document

Encoding is pretty easy once you get started—it's just the bootstrapping process that's difficult.

The Ur-Encoder, 1987

When first learning about TEI encoding at the WWP, there are several things to bear in mind: An encoding language that took 25 committees three years to write should take one person about a month to learn. A natural language that took an entire civilization hundreds of years to evolve is not going to be easily represented by an encoding language that only took three years to write. Obscure texts by women are structured much the same as familiar texts by men, except when they aren't.

Ode to the Encoder I think that I shall never see A poem as lovely as a tree And likewise we will never show 'em An XML file as lovely as a poem. But if we try, we can convey The tree's loveliness, or that of a summer's day In verse, and if we tag it well, Also the poem's loveliness in the XML.
Syd, an encoder The Fool
Act 2
Scene 1 Syd Pacing anxiously To tag, or not to tag, that is the question Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer The chaos of the underencoded document Or, by adding markup, to risk overtagging And thereby fix the text. To tag, to parse To parse—perchance to validate… Enter the Fool

Fools always speak in prose and they don't agonize about the cosmics of encoding either.