The Document World: Pre-Industrial Canada (SGML)

• Separates presentation and structure
• Authors do structure, programs to presentation
• International standard (not owned by a vendor)
• Human-readable (data longevity)
• Let's you define your set of tags and validate
• "The Boeing Problem"

And Now, The Bad News

• Optimized for hand-editing, not software
• No help in defining what tags mean or how they should be presented
• Many optional features and parameters, but DTD required
• Very (very!) hard to implement
• Incomplete, and hard to layer on top of

Conclusion: requires software to work, but makes it hard to make that software work, much less work interoperably. Expensive and difficult.

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Copyright (c) 2001 Mary Holstege
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