Re: SGML/HTML mailing list/newsgroup info

[SuePStewrt -at- AOL -dot- COM]

Here is the full group of posts I got in response to my recent request for
SGML/HTML
mailing list info:

(1)

Send mail to Holger Wendt (wendt -at- vax -dot- ntp -dot- springer -dot- de) for more info
     about SGML-L.

--
Karl Vogel   vogelke -at- c-17igp -dot- wpafb -dot- af -dot- mil [134.136.19.253]

(2)

Send a message to listserv -at- dhdurz1 -dot- bitnet (or, if you can't send directly
to a bitnet address, send it to listserv%dhdurz1 -dot- bitnet -at- cunyvm -dot- cuny -dot- edu -dot- 
And, in the body of the message, enter SUBSCRIBE SGML-L <your name>.

Lori Lathrop ------------> INTERNET:76620 -dot- 456 -at- compuserve -dot- com
Lathrop Media Services
P.O. Box 808
Georgetown, CO  80444
(303)567-4011

(3)

The newsgroup you are talking about is comp.text.sgml. Here is information
about subscribing and submitting articles:

 To subscribe, send a note to <comp-text-sgml-request -at- naggum -dot- no>.  You
 will be added to the mailing list if I can talk to a system that is
 willing to accept mail for you and which does not send error messages
 to wrong places.  (This is not only embarrassing for me, but I won't
 know of the problem before several such messages have been sent.)

 To post an article, send it to <comp-text-sgml -at- news -dot- naggum -dot- no>.  If you
 reply to an article you have received from the mailing list, this will
 be automatic.  The only thing I ask you to do is to keep the article
 number that appears in the Subject header.  If you don't, it will take
 me more time to post the article, and this may cause delays.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

/chet

--
Chet Ensign
Information Builders, Inc.                212-736-6250 X4349
1250 Broadway
New York, NY  10001

internet: doccoe -at- ibivm -dot- ibmmail -dot- com

(4)

It took me a little while but here is the title and address for the SGML-L
list

SGML-L LISTSERV -at- DHDURZ1 -dot- BITNET (or LISTSERV -at- VM -dot- URZ -dot- UNI-HEIDELBERG -dot- DE)

Hope this helps.


Stan
radomski -at- esseye -dot- si -dot- com -dot- pubs08

(5)

You might get some help from the SGML-L mailing list.  To
subscribe, send an e-mail message to listserv -at- dhdurz1 -dot- bitnet
and, in the body of the message, enter SUBSCRIBE SGML-L <your name>.

I think there's also a comp.text.sgml newsgroup that might be of help if
you have access to Usenet newsgroups.

Lori Lathrop --------------> INTERNET:76620 -dot- 456 -at- compuserve -dot- com
Lathrop Media Services
P.O. Box 808
Georgetown, CO  80444
(303)567-4011

(6)

The SGML list is at ifi.uio.no. I believe you can subscribe by writing to

 sgml -dot- request -at- ifi -dot- uio -dot- no

but it's been a while since I was last there and this may have changed.
If you do subsribe, you might want to look at their FAQ before doing
anything else.

     Robert Bononno /// Techline
     bononno -at- acf2 -dot- nyu -dot- edu
     CIS 73670,1570

(7)

The newsgroup is comp.text.sgml

Binion

(8)

4/8/94
TEI-L -at- UICVM -dot- UIC -dot- EDU

"TEI" is the Text Encoding Initiative, a study/advocacy
group that has immersed it/themselves in the SGML
topic. Now, there isn't a lot of interaction on the
list (I've been there about two months...), but they
have an overwhelming ftp archive at:

SGML -at- UK -dot- AC -dot- EXETER

-- where there's stuff like:

* IBMIDDOC (the BookManager follow-on that IBM
  has purportedly planned...)

* ISO8879 (SGML ISO standard -- look for something
  called the (nicely done) Annotated Bibl. and List
  of Resources

* COURSES (Univ./College courses covering SGML)

* CoST (the Copenhagen SGML Tool for translation of
  SGML-based stuff

* HyTime (A standard and, I think, available SGML
  encoding tool that is giving IBM BookManager envelopers
  a nervous disorder...

***************************************************************

Re SGML, there's a huge repository of stuff at ifi.uio.no, which is where
the SGML list originates from.

******************************************************************

> Is there an Internet SGML list of which you are aware? I cannot
> access Bitnet.

The internet SGML newsgroup is comp-text-sgml. To subscribe, send a note to
<comp-text-sgml-request -at- naggum -dot- no>. The gentleman who maintains the archive
is Erik Naggum. comp-text-sgml is *the* place to get info on SGML.

To post an article, send it to <comp-text-sgml -at- news -dot- naggum -dot- no>

Best regards,

/chet

--
Chet Ensign
Information Builders, Inc.                212-736-6250 X4349
1250 Broadway
New York, NY  10001

internet: doccoe -at- ibivm -dot- ibmmail -dot- com
ibmmail:  USUBUVMV -at- IBMMAIL
compuserve: 73163,1414



(9) This one is long, with lotsa info, and is the LAST one if you don't need
to read it--

HTML *is* SGML. To be more specific, it is one implementation of SGML.
SGML is simply a meta-language for defining specific markup languages for
documents... although the word "document" is a very broad category here.
For our purposes, "document" does not equal "book".

I'll append a "what is SGML in 25 words or less" to the end of this
message. But to answer your first couple of questions, there's no SGML
spec that I know of anywhere on the internet. The ISO standard itself
is, of course, for sale from the ISO and, being a legal document, it is
not especially enlightening. *The* technical reference, as far as I'm
concerned, is "The SGML Handbook" by Dr. Charles Goldfarb, published by
Oxford University Press. It is the ISO standard, liberally reorganized and
annotated by Dr. Goldfarb, the primary author of SGML. It is $95, so maybe
you want to insist that your library stock a copy of it.

As to HTML docs, try these:

1>  http://www-external.hal.com/connolly/html-design.html.  It's Dan
Connolly's
notebook on the design of a successor for HTML.  It's got pointers to lots of
related stuff.

2> http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/HTML.dtd.html
      and
   http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/htmlplusdtd.txt

I have a recent draft of the HTML specs that came from this repository. It
explains all the HTML tags.

The rest of this message is a brief, general overview of SGML itself. Hope
this is useful to you.



Subject: Overview of SGML, from a posting to comp-text-sgml


SGML is not a markup language nor is it a product. You can not buy SGML. SGML
is an international standard (ISO 8879) which many vendors (Arbortext,
Avalanche, EBT, Exoterica, Frame, Interleaf, SoftQuad, WordPerfect...) are
using to develop or enhance text processing products.

Think of it this way. SGML does for text what relational theory and SQL did
for regular data over a decade ago (and we always have to give Tim Bray of
Open Text a nod when we say this -- he made the point in a wonderful
presentation at SGML '92). It provides us with a method -- a framework -- for
describing (and marking up) text that is independent of the program that
creates it.

Here now. Take the markup language of your choice -- Rich Text Format, LaTEX,
Script, you name it -- and what have you got? What you've got is a language
that tells a specific product how to make text look the way you want it to
look. Different word processor, different platform -- so sorry. Send us ASCII
instead. We don't understand all those formatting codes of yours.

But what is format, anyway? It is IMPLIED visual information about the
organization and structure that you have put the text into. In fact, one
simple way to define "document" is that it is text and graphics contained in
some sort of organizing framework -- chapter, division, subdivision, subsub-
divison, topic, or what-have-you. All those visual cues that the GUI word
processors make it so easy to paint on -- different fonts, indented margins,
pretty drop shadow boxes -- they are all meant to help us interpret, as we
read what each chunk of text is supposed to be. "Oh, this big font here means
I've started a new section. Oh, that stuff inside the box must be a screen
shot. "

SGML says -- why imply it? That's fine for the printout and the reader, but
why make the markup behind that display be as ambiguous as the display
itself.
Ambiguous? Well, I mean, a lot of stuff gets printed italic in my manuals,
but
the italicized stuff is not all the same kind of thing. Some of it is book
titles, some is system keywords, some of it is "hey, pay attention to me"
emphasized phrases. Why not have the underlying markup say "This is a book
title, this is a keyword, and this over here is the writer waving at you."
Then, different output systems can display them whatever way is best. Make it
italic on paper, bold on my mainframe and ignore it completely when it goes
to
comp.text.sgml.

This is called "generic coding." You say what a piece of text is instead of
what it is supposed to look like, by defining the elements that can go into
your documents and using their names as tags to show where each starts and
ends. Lets say you define paragraphs to be <para> and bulleted lists to be
<listbul> and items in the list to be <it>. Then, instead of having perfectly
plain, eminently readable, ever so exchangeable markup and text like:

****************************

\pard\plain \s254\sb120 \b\f18 {\f21 Chapter Divider Page\par }\pard\plain
\f3
The chapter divider page can be completely derived by the system by
extracting
the following information.\par
\pard\plain \s253\li360 \b\f3 chapter #\par
chapter title\par
graphic - logo\par
graphic - sequence marker\par
\pard\plain \f3 \par
}\pard\plain \f3 Chapter table of contents can be completely derived by the
system by extracting the following information.\par

****************************

You have something a bit less dense like:


****************************
<sect><title>Chapter Divider Page</title>
    *** and note that the / means it's the end of the named element ***
<para>The chapter divider page can be completely derived by the system by
extracting the following information.</para>
<listbul>
<it>chapter #</it>
<it>chapter title</it>
<it>graphic - logo </it>
<it>graphic - sequence marker</it>
</listbul>
<para>Chapter table of contents can be completely derived by the system by
extracting the following information.</para>

****************************

Which I maintain is a big improvement.

Where do you define the elements? You write a data definition called a
Document Type Definition (DTD). The DTD does a lot of work in SGML, but the
lion's share of it is a collection of statements that each declare an element
that can occur in the document and what stuff -- text, other elements -- the
element can contain. It is equivalent to the data definition you write for a
database.

Now you may reply "This is all very well and good but so what? I don't have
to
look at those codes anyway." And you're right. You don't. But your computer
sure does. And what your computer looks at and what it can do with it goes a
long way towards determining what you are going to be able to do with that
document you see.

That DTD gives systems a lot of control and leverage over documents. The fact
that an explicit declaration of the construction of your document exists
means
that programs can be written to compare a document with its DTD and tell you
whether it is coded correctly or, if not, give you meaningful error messages
about what is tagged improperly. This gets referred to as "parsing."

Have you ever run into the situation where you get a file from somebody else
and you merge it into the middle of the document you are writing and then
spend the rest of the day trying to figure out why, from that point on, your
margins are whacked and fonts keep going to Courier on the printout and etc.
etc. ? I am a writer and, believe me, I have. In word processed files, the
underlying markup can get so complex, so intricate, so idiosyncratic, that
there is no way to check whether what you are getting is going to be
compatible with what you've done but to dump it in and see what happens. Most
of the time, it works. But when it doesn't, you get to spend a couple of
hours
on the phone with Microsoft support and, well, you get the idea.

Parsing is one of the aspects of SGML that makes it very attractive to me.
I'm
supposed to corral the creative proclivities of 20 writers inside my
department and another 20 or so scattered across the company and me it
possible for them all to work as a team on large, collaboratively produced
documents so that they come together like a jigsaw puzzle, with nice clean
clicks and snaps, not with gurgles and burps and downtime while the lead
writer calls Microsoft. The prospect of a system that controls the underlying
markup of these documents and error checks a contribution BEFORE that
contribution brings the document to its knees I view with a fervor normally
reserved for a long weekend in Aruba.

All this means nothing if there are no products on the market that support
the
standard. But those products have started arriving. Companies like SoftQuad,
Arbortext and Datalogics that have been putting together SGML based
publishing
systems for sometime. Interleaf, Frame and others are just now releasing
versions of their composition systems that (to some degree or another) take
advantage of SGML. And many of the vendors recently banded together to form
SGML Open, a consortium intended to help them make SGML products work more
seamlessly together.

Best regards,

/chet

--
Chet Ensign
Information Builders, Inc.                212-736-6250 X4349
1250 Broadway
New York, NY  10001

internet: doccoe -at- ibivm -dot- ibmmail -dot- com
ibmmail:  USUBUVMV -at- IBMMAIL
compuserve: 73163,1414