TEI- The Exciting Innovation

I'm having way too much fun coming up with what TEI could stand for (see Nov. 4 posting.) However, the new title reflects my new attitude towards coding- it's cool!

The example above is pretty indicative of what I've been doing for the last 4 hours. I know that it's hard to see, but you all pretty much know what computer code looks like, don't you? (Maybe I'm weird, though. I did date a computer geek for 5+ years...) But anyway, I'm having a great time with this. It's fascinating to figure out the things that you're supposed to mark up in a document. I'm coding a play, I'm still only on the first scene, and I've already got:

1. 26 footnotes.
2. Three different categories of names.
3. Three different categories of places.
4. A way to look at words both with their archaic and modern spellings.
5. Divisions between speakers, speeches, lines, scenes, line groups, etc.
6. A really funky way that I have to code an ampersand (&) and an emdash(—) LOL. My blog thinks that my code for & and -- are the real thing, so I can see it, but you can't. That amuses me for some strange reason. Probably because I've been coding for 4 hours straight!
   

Of course, all of the above things take a TON of code to say. I’d show you, but my blog wants to think that it’s HTML and do weird things to my font, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. It’s not exactly the most efficient process, but it's going to be so cool when it's done! And yes, my fancy schmancy coding program does make it all pretty colours like in the picture. Much easier on the eyes.

So, I'm admitting that I was wrong at the beginning. Coding isn't so scary. It's really quite logical, and it makes you read with so much more depth than you do normally, because you have to keep an eye out for all of the things that you should be tagging. I’ve already got tags for: historical people, mythological people, semi-historical people, mythological places, real places, words that have archaic spellings, words that have difficult meanings, things that need to be indented, italicized, underlined…the list goes on. It turns out that TEI stands for Turns out to be Extremely Interesting. Wish me luck in getting it done, and I’ll post the link for my finished play when it’s online. Should be near the beginning of December. Happy early Christmas to me!