Re: XML and SGML

[Marcus Carr <mrc@allette.com.au>]

Rod Davison wrote:

> SGML is designed for documention.

While I agree with the rest of what Rod wrote, I think that the definition above
might be a bit too narrow - I'd say that SGML was designed for information
capture. While SGML was principally used for documentation, that was largely due
to the lack of supporting technology - we knew how and why to capture it, but
there just weren't many really interesting ways to use it.

We demo'd a tool at some of the conferences in the mid nineties that did
legislative updates. The structure and content of an amendment Act was used to
generate an OmniMark script that was applied to the principal Act, updating it
automatically. These could be chained together, allowing rolling control based on
dates. While this type of markup wasn't front and centre, there were people using
SGML for many of the same purposes that we now use XML. Still, we'd have killed
for the range of tools available today...


--
Regards,

Marcus Carr                      email:  mrc@allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
Allette Systems (Australia)      www:    http://www.allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
       - Einstein