<!-- 2.4 Status of This Draft -->
<h2>Status of This Draft
<p>
This is the first public draft of these Guidelines.  It is intended to
make clear the directions being taken in the development of the TEI
scheme and to enable informed public discussion by making concrete
proposals for text encoding.
<p>
The developers and editors believe that the Guidelines as presented in
this draft represent a sound basic approach and a good foundation for
further work.  No reader, however, should entertain illusions about the
permanence of this particular form of the recommendations.  Nothing in
this draft is immune from discussion or modification as a result of the
public testing and discussion we hope it will provoke.  In particular,
changes may be expected in the following areas:
<ul>
<li>names of tags, names of attributes, and specific attribute values
may be changed
<li>new tags will be introduced to cover some areas not now addressed
<li>some tags now defined may be eliminated, redefined, or merged with
other tags for the sake of consistency with other tags
        <fn>This is particularly likely in the cases where similar
        problems arise in separate areas; in this draft, such problems
        have sometimes received multiple solutions which should be
        merged or harmonized in later revisions.
        </fn>
<li>groups of tags may be revised to reduce the number of tags required
to handle a markup problem
<li>Some tags may be transformed into attributes of other tags; some
attributes may become tags in their own right.
</ul>
<p>
Some areas seem unlikely to change very much, though no guarantees are
offered:
<ul>
<li>it seems unlikely that the choice of SGML as the syntactic basis for
the encoding scheme will need to be reconsidered
<li>the way in which most problem areas are broken down and assigned
tags seems less likely to change than the names and specific
interrelationships of the tags themselves
</ul>
As a result, it appears likely that the encoding recommended by this
draft may be used without fear that future versions of the TEI scheme
will be inconsistent with it in fundamental ways.  The types of changes
expected are all such as to allow a fairly straightforward transduction
from texts marked up according to this draft into texts marked up in
accordance with future drafts.  The TEI will be sensitive, in revising
this draft, to the possible problems which revision might pose for those
who are already using this draft.  Wherever consistent with the
long-term goals of the project, consistency with this draft will be
preserved in future revisions.
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