The 'application/tei+xml' mediatype
draft-lundberg-app-tei-xml-03

Abstract

This document defines the 'application/tei+xml' media type for markup languages defined in accordance with the Text Encoding and Interchange guidelines

Status of this Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on March 6, 2011.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

1.  Introduction
2.  Registration of MIME type 'application/tei+xml'
3.  Recognizing TEI files
4.  Fragment identifier
5.  Security considerations
    5.1.  Harmful content
    5.2.  Intellectual Property Rights
    5.3.  Authenticity and confidentiality
6.  IANA Considerations
7.  References
    7.1.  Normative References
    7.2.  Informative References
§  Authors' Addresses

1.  Introduction

The TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that is widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to represent all kinds of textual material for online research and teaching. [TEI] (, “TEI Guidelines,” .)

In order to increase the possibilities for generic XML processing of TEI documents on the Internet this document defines the 'application/tei+xml' media type in accordance with [RFC3023] (Murata, M., St. Laurent, S., and D. Kohn, “XML Media Types,” January 2001.).

2.  Registration of MIME type 'application/tei+xml'

MIME media type name: application

MIME subtype name: tei+xml

Required parameters: None

Optional parameters: charset

Identical with charset in [RFC3023] (Murata, M., St. Laurent, S., and D. Kohn, “XML Media Types,” January 2001.)

Encoding considerations:

By virtue of TEI XML content being XML, it has the same considerations when sent as 'application/tei+xml' as does XML in general. See RFC 3023 [RFC3023] (Murata, M., St. Laurent, S., and D. Kohn, “XML Media Types,” January 2001.), Section 3.2.

Security considerations:

TEI elements may refer to arbitrary URIs. Hence the security issues of [RFC3986] (Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, “Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax,” January 2005.), section 7, apply. See also Security considerations (Security considerations)

Interoperability considerations:

TEI documents often have the extension '.xml', which is not uncommon for other XML document formats.

Published specification:

This media type registration is for TEI documents as described in the TEI Guidelines[TEI] (, “TEI Guidelines,” .).

Applications which use this media type:

There are currently no applications using the media type 'application/tei+xml'. It will be an entirely new type which is registered in order to allow for the deployment of TEI on the World Wide Web as a first class XML application.

Additional information:

Magic number(s):

There is no single initial octet sequence that is always present in TEI documents.

file extension(s):

Common extensions are '.tei', '.teiCorpus' and '.odd'.

Macintosh File Type Code(s)

TEXT

Object Identifier(s) or OID(s)

Not applicable

3.  Recognizing TEI files

TEI files are XML documents or fragments having the root element in a TEI namespace, i.e., a namespace URI starting with http://www.tei-c.org/ns/ followed by the version number of the namespace. The current namespace is http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0

In general, a [TEI] (, “TEI Guidelines,” .) file usually contains either of the strings

<TEI

<teiCorpus

near the beginning, and usually after an XML declaration on the first line, i.e., a string like "<?xml ... ?>".

Examples:

Frequently, the actual XML content of TEI files will contain <TEI somewhere early on.

More specialized types of documents may start with a lower case tei as in <teiCorpus.

4.  Fragment identifier

Documents having the media type 'application/tei+xml', use the fragment identifier notation in the way specified in [RFC3023] (Murata, M., St. Laurent, S., and D. Kohn, “XML Media Types,” January 2001.) for the media type 'application/xml'.

5.  Security considerations

An XML resource does not in itself compromise data security. When being available on a network simply through the dereferencing of an IRI [RFC3987] (Duerst, M. and M. Suignard, “Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs),” January 2005.) or a URI, care must be taken to properly interpret the data to prevent unintended access.

5.1.  Harmful content

Any application accepting submitted or retrieving TEI XML for processing has to be aware of risks connected with injection of harmful scripts and executable XML. Even common XML inclusion or the use of external entities, could potentially be used to reveal aspects of a service that may compromise its security. Any vulnerability of these kinds are, however, application specific. The TEI namespaces do not contain such elements.

5.2.  Intellectual Property Rights

TEI documents often arise in digitization of cultural heritage materials. Texts made accessible in TEI format may be free in the sense that there are no restrictions to their distribution through Digital Rights Management[DRM] (, “Digital rights management,” .) or Intellectual Property Rights[IPR] (, “Intellectual property,” .) constraints. TEI documents are heterogeneous objects. Some parts of a document may be free, whereas other parts, such as editorial text and annotations may be written much later may hence be subject to DRM restrictions.

The TEI format provides means for highly granular attribution, down to the content of individual XML elements. Software agents participating in the exchange or processing TEI must honour markup of this kind. Even when there are no IPR constraints, intellectual honesty alone requires that document users are able to tell the difference between content from different sources.

5.3.  Authenticity and confidentiality

Historical archival records are often encoded in TEI and legal document may be binding centuries after they were written. Digitization and encoding of legal texts may require technologies for assuring authenticity, such as cryptographic check sums and electronic signatures.

Similarly, historical documents may in part their entirety be confidential. This may be required by law or by the terms and conditions of a donation. A text archive need content filtering or cryptographic technologies to meet such requirements.

6.  IANA Considerations

Registration of MIME type 'application/tei+xml' (Registration of MIME type 'application/tei+xml')

7.  References

7.1. Normative References

7.2. Informative References

Authors' Addresses