Re: SGML vs XML

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

At Thursday, 28 June 2001, Marcus Carr <mrc@allette.com.au> wrote:

>SwetaG@riskinc.com wrote:
>
>>      I have many times read when i am going through the XML tutorials 
that
>> SGML is to complex to be to be implem,ented for the web senario
>
>I've read that too...:-)

Actually it was untrue. SGML was perfectly usable over the Web, and 
still
is provided you have the right software. The CELT project (celt.ucc.
ie) has
a big collection of SGML (TEI) files of historical documents and 
they are
still available as plain SGML for use with the Panorama or MultiDoc Pro
browsers, complete with stylesheets, DTDs, and catalogs. However,
as both
browsers are no longer available, it's all being moved into XML, so the
ancillary files are offline for the moment.

Setting it up was fiddly, but once done it worked perfectly, and 
the browsers
(Panorama even came as a plugin for Netscape) gave you an excellent
formatted display with programmable navigation bar, context-sensitive 
search,
and HyTime linking. I just posted to xml-dev about XLink, which now 
makes
similar linking features available to XML.

It is undoubtedly more complex to set up than HTML or XML, but by 
no means
impossible. When XML browsers eventually implement context-sensitive 
searching 
and all the linking goodies, we'll finally be back to where we were 
in 1994 :-)

///Peter