Since its launch in 1987, the Text Encoding Initiative has become the reference platform for the representation of text based digital assets in the humanities. As such, it has shaped the current Digital Humanities landscape by bringing a wide multi-disciplinary community into sharing a common set of concepts, and above all, by leveraging the global technical competence of scholars in XML technologies. In this this talk we show how the technical, but also editorial, experience gained over the years may be the base for providing even more service to the humanities. We present the main architecture and components of the TEI and describe new mechanisms through the example of the future standOff component. We also show how the TEI can also liaise closely with international standardisation environment such as ISO in the domain of language resources.