COLOR – My text has some partial red highlighting of letters and what might be a punctuation marker.  However, since the highlight is only partial, rather than making the entire letter or words red, there should probably be an attribute indicating its partial status.  The <hi> tag would be useful here, with added attributes: rend. I suggest, based on the TEI format, for my own purpose but possibly others, <hi rend = “color(red) length(partial)”.  The TEI info says you can double value an attribute, but I don’t know if this is good practice. Also I don’t know if “length” is the ideal word for the other value.

DAMAGE – There is some smudging on my section, which although not completely hiding the letters that it spans, does obscure it just a touch.  This seems to be a common element suggested by others as well, and given that there is an existing tag for it, I just recommend we use <damage> but also include the attribute “type.”  In my case, the damage looks like a smudge so <damage type=”smudge”>.

ABBREVIATIONS – This text has many abbreviations, so we should definitely use the <abbr> tag.  However, if the purpose of the markup exercise is to make explicit the things that are implicit, I suggest we see if we can find a way to formalize the type of the abbreviation, as it may be useful to other future scholars.  As someone who does not work in the high and late medieval ages, the abbreviated forms themselves are foreign to me and having a regularized way of identifying similar abbreviations would assist in my learning them, as well as being categorized for future scholars in my predicament, or just wanting to track the frequency of abbreviations.  If we need a classification scheme, I think handout five already organizes the abbrevations in a particular way. We could simply follow their format, especially if the book is considered a basic textbook of the field.

EXPANSION – I treat this entirely separate from abbreviations.  I view the markup of abbreviations as an attempt to identify the abbreviated forms as their own symbols.  The expansion of their meaning however, is something else, so my suggestion is we separate the two practices.  There are provided tags for this in <expan> and <ex>.

ERRORS – I think the <orig> tag would work best here, followed by <reg> for any corrections, rather than using the sic tag.  I notice however that <orig> does not have a “type” attribute although it has a “rend” attribute. I imagine it’d be useful to indicate what exactly is wrong with the original in the event that it is beyond a spelling error, but then again I don’t know what other types of errors would exist.  I’d be interested in if people have suggestions as to what other kinds of mistakes might exist.