Markdown to markup: use of markdown notation to simplify the creation of TEI documents

Creating new XML documents, from scratch or from plain-text, can be a difficult, time consuming and error prone task, specially when the markup vocabulary used is rich and complex, as is the case of the TEI. It usually takes a good amount of time to make the document validate for the first time.

In the old times, SGML allowed certain freedom to document encoders, which were meant to save time and effort, like leaving certain tags open, or not using quotes for all attribute values. In this sense, SGML was more permissive than XML. This was good for human encoders, but made it difficult for programmers to create parsers and applications that fully complied SGML's permissive set of rules and inferences. On the contrary, XML was made to very restrictive, and in turn more predictable, which makes parsing and processing easier, and contributed to the fast popularity that XML gained soon after its introduction.

In the Wiki world, a myriad of Wiki languages emerged, with the purpose of simplifying, or completely avoiding HTML markup. Among them, Markdown is a recent and very successful shorthand notation to avoid writing HTML tags while still keeping text legibility intact.

By joining the spirit of good-old SGML, and the principles behind Markdown, we came to the idea of the down2TEI project, which consists of an extension to the markdown syntax meant for the creation of TEI-XML documents, and the corresponding parsers needed to perform such conversion. With this approach, it is easy to obtain a valid TEI document in a very short time, avoiding going through a long list of validation errors.