Victorian Women Writers

The main advantage of ASCII text is that is widely available. It can be read by the vast majority of software and in 1972 it was adopted as international standard. It is possible to perform simple searches on documents written in plain text and many E-Texts are available in this form. A text in ASCII form however will appear less sophisticated than a word processed document and any formatting will be lost. This is in important consideration in poetry for example where the form and layout of the text can often make a significant contribution to the meaning.

<B>George Eliot</B>’s sixth novel is entitled <I>Middlemarch</I>.

George Eliot’s sixth novel is entitled Middlemarch.

HTML files are therefore more visually appealing than ASCII files and attempts can be made to maintain a sense of the original formatting of a document. Long documents are often easier to read on screen in HTML form than are text files.

SGML is the markup language recommended by the TEI as it allows for greater control of a text and enables scholars to perform much more complex and precise searches of a text. A search on document in ASCII or HTML form could find all the examples of a certain word in the entire text but a search performed on an SGML encoded document could limit that search to lines spoken by an individual character. Institutions that adhere to the TEI guidelines will produce texts that are encoded in SGML. However, it should be noted that whereas most web browsers can read these files, to perform additional searches and sophisticated textual analyses, additional software will be required.