What is ESIS? (answer from Jacques Deseyne)

From owner-sp-prog@cygnus.uwa.edu.au Thu Apr 17 05:27:27 1997
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 11:27:16 +0200
From: Jacques.Deseyne@sema.be (Jacques Deseyne)
Subject: Re: ESIS

Choi Wonseog wrote :

>What is ESIS?
>Thanks.
>...

ESIS is the ISO 8879 Element Structure Information Set,
i.e. "[t]he set of information that is acted upon by
implementations of structure-controlled applications".

ESIS is not formally described in ISO 8879:1986. A document
by Dr. Charles Goldfarb for WG8 (the workgroup on "standards 
for languages and resources for the description and 
processing of compound and hypermedia documents") describes 
ESIS explicitly; the quote is taken from the document.

Its reference is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 N1035 and is
published in Goldfarb's SGML handbook. You can
also ftp the document from Dr. Mason's WG8 site :

        ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/WG8/DOCS/0931.doc
        ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/WG8/DOCS/0931esis.doc

I'm not sure about the difference in numbering; maybe the 
version on the ftp server is older, but the content
seems to be identical at first sight.

The DSSSL standard defines (and the HyTime Technical 
Corrigendum will define) the SGML Property Set, which
defines a much more comprehensive set of information
which describes an SGML document.

If you want to know about ESIS, read the documents; if
you want to implement structure-controlled applications
for the future, look at the SGML Property Set (and at 
James Clark's DSSSL Engine, Jade).

Best regards,

--------------------------------------------------------
Jacques Deseyne <Jacques.Deseyne@sema.be>
SEMA Group Belgium - Stallestraat 96 - B-1180 Brussels

Tel + {32} 2 333 53 71
Fax + {32} 2 333 53 22