Critical editions historically have been published as printed books, they are now more often published as electronic resources, mostly as websites. The introduction of electronic publishing toolchains exposed a fundamental distinction between the data of the edition, usually XML/TEI files, and its presentation, usually HTML pages generated on the fly from the TEI files. This distinction leads to an important question: what constitutes the core of an edition? Its data or its presentation? It is possible to think of a critical edition as a collection of pieces of pure data? Or is a representation layer fundamental to the concept of ‘edition’? This paper summarizes the two extreme positions that, for the sake of argument,
have been held in the panel: the core of the edition lies only in the data vs. the presentation constitutes the core of the scholarly effort. The paper also reports some of the remarks that have been expressed during the discussion that followed
the panel.