The TEI guidelines apply just as well to creating new texts as to transcribing old ones, but other approaches may be a better choice for some highly-structured collections of information: for example, the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) DTD is designed for archival finding aids, of the sort that an edition might create in the course of its work, and a finding aid in this form would be more useful to a library than a TEI-encoded description. Similarly, the MASTER DTD is specifically adapted for encoding descriptions of manuscripts; it is also based on the TEI DTD, and indeed is now under consideration for incorporation into a future version of the TEI guidelines. A project that involves the creation of new software might choose to use the DocBook DTD for that software’s documentation, as it is a DTD designed for that purpose and there are existing tools for using such information in ways that users of software need (Walsh and Muellner). In cases of this sort, there’s good reason to adopt a practice that was developed for a specific kind of writing or scholarship and that produces encoded information that is as well-documented and robust as TEI data; following such standard practices is likely to increase the utility of these specialized kinds of information.