I will not detail anything about TEI. Sorry. I would just like to let you know that every time I need to work with any TEI subset, I find myself amazed with the quality of their documentation and the details they thought on before writing the standard.
Sometimes I just get to me thinking… do I really need all this stuff? The common answer is, no, I do not need so much detail on my annotations.
But that doesn’t mean I should not use TEI. Probably I should look to the section about the items I am trying to annotate and meditate. Probably I will not need the amount of different tags and details that are defined by TEI. But I am almost sure I will find one or two that I did not thought about. Then, I can use the portion of TEI I really want and forget about the rest. Probably my document will not validate against TEI, but probably it will not be too far away. And, probably, if someone else looks to the document, she will probably understand. And, if she don’t, I can always point to the TEI documentation and say: I am not using it all, but the subset I thought to be relevant.
Where am I using TEI? You can see it being used in the Dicionário-Aberto project, where the dictionary is encoded in a TEI subset. Also, I am looking to the TEI header and filtering it, making it an option to annotate documents on a parallel corpora project.