Not TEI by Design:  A Digital Scholarly Edition of Paradise Lost

1. Abstract

The TEI continues to work toward becoming the default method for encoding and publishing digital scholarly editions. But TEI-xml has to be transformed, one way or another, in order to become readable by humans, either in print or online. To be read online, TEI encoded scholarly editions have to be transformed into the web's native language, html. Because "HTML and JavaScript have grown into . . . powerful technologies" (Ford and Thompson. “An Adventure with Client-Side XSLT to an Architecture for Building Bridges with Javascript”) it makes sense, perhaps especially when presenting an already well-documented text, to eschew TEI and encode the text directly in html, using css and javascript (as, if needed php) to offer an affordance-rich digital scholarly edition. In this short presentation of _A Paradise Lost Portal_ such an edition, along with its encoding, will be offered.