The communities around various tag sets may pressure users to encode information they do not need in documents because the community expects it: TEI users may feel pressure to provide more metadata, JATS users to provide richly encoded citations, HTML users to use more generic tags in place of visually descriptive tags.

As an example, once you have drunk the TEI Kool-Aid, the TEI community may pressure you to encode your documents in ways that are useful to the full community, even if some of that encoding is of no value to you and your project – because someone else may want to reuse your documents for another project at some indefinite time in the future.

This “do it for the good of the community” is not unique to the TEI. “Do a bit extra for the community” is the energy that is expected to (that does?) power the semantic web. It is also the hope behind groups like JATS4R. JATS is the current most popular Journal Article Tag Suite and JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) is a group of JATS users who believe that the JATS vocabularies and guidelines are too loose; there is too much variation in legal JATS documents to make it convenient to reuse them, particularly for machine reuse such as data-mining. So, JATS4R is developing and publishing a set of guidelines and some Schematron rules to help the creators of JATS documents make more similar use of JATS. For example, JATS provides many ways to encode author names, author affiliations, and the relationship between authors and their affiliations. JATS4R recommends a smaller number of ways to do this (ideally just one).