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&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Each of the blobs here represents three subtly different things: an ODD : that is, a collection of TEI specifications a formal schema generated from that ODD, and its natural language documentation the set of documents considered valid by that schema.The TEI provides TEI All : a set of over 500 uniquely identifiable elements, classes, attributes, etc. and a schema in which they are all permitted. For all practical purposes a user of the TEI must make a selection from this cornucopia, and we call that selection a TEI subset. Of course there are many many possible TEI subsets, each making different choices of elements or attributes or classes, but the sets of documents which each consequent schema will validate all have in common that they will also be considered valid by the schema TEI All.A user of the TEI may however do more than simply choose a subset of the provided specifications. They may also provide additional constraints for aspects of an encoding left underspecified by the TEI, for example by requiring that attribute values be taken from a closed list of possible values rather than being any syntactically valid token. They may simply change the datatype of an attribute, for example from a string to an integer or a date. They may also provide an alternative identifier for an element or an attribute, for example to change its canonical English name for one from another language. In some cases, attribute value changes are equivalent to a subsetting operation; in others not. Renaming operations never result in a subset: a document in which the element names have all been changed to their French equivalents cannot be validated by an English language version of TEI All. A user of the TEI can also change the content model or the class membership of existing TEI elements, in ways which may or may not be equivalent to a subsetting operation.We use the term customised subset for all these kinds of personalisation because they result in something which is not necessarily a further subset of the TEI subset concerned, but a further modification of it. In the general case, their conformance with TEI All can be determined only by inspection, and their validation may require some additional processing.Finally, a user of the TEI is at liberty to define entirely new elements and attributes, and to make such components members of existing TEI classes so that existing TEI elements may refer to them. They may also modify the content models of existing TEI elements to refer explicitly to such new elements. This results in an extended subset, since it contains elements or attributes additional to those provided by the TEI All schema. Such additional components should always be labelled as belonging to a non-TEI namespace. A processor can then determine that these components may be left out of consideration when determining the validity of a document with respect to TEI All.In additional to these formal considerations, TEI conformance involves attention to some less easily verifiable constraints, specifically the twin requirements of honesty and explicitness. By honesty we mean that elements in the TEI namespace must respect the semantics which the TEI Guidelines supply as a part of their definition. By explicitness we mean that all modifications (i.e. both customized and extended subsets) should be expressed using an ODD to document exactly how the TEI declarations on which they are based have been derived. (An ODD need not of course be based on the TEI at all, but in that case the question of TEI conformance does not arise)Formally speaking, we can say of a conformant TEI document : it must be a well formed XML document and it is valid against the TEI All schema : without modification (it is a TEI subset), or after deletion of any elements it contains which are not in the TEI namespace including their children, irrespective of namespace (it is a TEI extension), or after application of any canonicalization algorithm specified by its associated ODD (it is a TEI customized subset)The purpose of these and similar rules is to make interchange of documents easier. They do not however guarantee it, and they certainly do not provide any guarantee of interoperability. Unlike many other standards, the goal of the TEI is not to enforce or impose consistency of encoding, but to provide a means by which encoding choices and policies may be more readily understood, and hence (to some extent) algorithmically comparable.