Re: What is SGML?

[Mark Levinson <mark -at- SD -dot- CO -dot- IL>]

SGML is the Standard Generalized Markup Language.  Other people
in different time zones will be popping up later with better
explanations, but in the meantime...

SGML tags your text according to characteristics that are not
typographical but structural.  For example, rather than labelling
a particular string of words as 10-point New Century Schoolbook
italic centered, it might label them as a figure caption-- if
that's what they are-- without dictating what a figure caption
looks like.

Distributed in this form, texts can easily (with the help of
appropriate software) be printed out or displayed according
to the capabilities of any particular printer or display device.
(All you need, for the figure caption, is a program at the user's
site that dictates a particular representation for figure captions
along with representations of all the other structural elements of the
text-- body text, headers of various kinds, emphasized words, etc.)  Any
exact resemblance between the typography at the author's site and the
typography at the reader's site is coincidental.

One sexy use of SGML today is the HTML implementation, which
gets the same World Wide Web pages onto computer screens of
various kinds, under various operating systems and various
typographical restraints.

_________________________________________________________________________
 Mark L. Levinson           | E-mail:   mark -at- sd -dot- co -dot- il
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