This chapter describes the base tag set for prose texts, the simplest of the base tag sets defined by these Guidelines. It should be used for all texts in prose, whether fiction or non-fiction, novel or technical manual.

Prose material can appear in the front and back matter of virtually any text type, even where the body may be composed of very different component elements. Consequently, the elements needed to encode conventional prose are all included in the core tag set described in chapter ) and the base tag set for prose itself defines no elements at all: it merely invokes the tag set for default text structure. When this base tag set is used, all the elements defined in the core tag sets are available, as are those in the default text structure described in chapter . No other elements are available, unless one or more of the additional tag sets is also enabled.

The base tag set for prose should be invoked by defining the parameter entity tei.prose with the value INCLUDE. A document using this base tag set and no other will thus being as follows: ]> ]]>

The base tag set for prose is formally defined by the following DTD fragment: %TEI.structure.dtd; ]]&nil;> ]]>