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Last modified: October 29, 2002
SGML: General Introductions and Overviews

This introductory section contains pointers to general information on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The documents referenced are designed to answer questions like "What is SGML?" and "Why is SGML important?" and "Who uses SGML?" and "What are the principal features of encoding notations used in SGML?"

Contents


SGML: Introductions and Overviews

A number of general introductions to SGML may be found on the Internet. Popular misconceptions about SGML abound, however: the initiate is warned not to believe just everything written about SGML. Short articles in the trade journals are notably inaccurate. Of the online SGML introductions and tutorials known to me, the following are of high or reasonable quality. The TEI "Gentle Introduction to SGML" cited below is especially good -- probably the best intermediate-depth SGML introduction available online. For XML in particular, see "Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)."


SGML FAQs (Answers to "Frequently Asked Questions")

[CR: 20021029] [Table of Contents]

Creation of a general and adequate FAQ file for SGML has proven elusive. Only an SGML expert is qualified to write the the most sensitive parts of the FAQ document, and the SGML experts are currently overworked. However, here is a list of several current and past attempts (some abortive) at preparing and maintaining FAQ documents. Some of the information in the FAQ documents is now out of date, but the core information is relatively timeless.


History of Generalized Markup and SGML

[CR: 19971008] [Table of Contents]

Note: I once had a research project underway which would have resulted in a written history of "the beginnings of SGML." I discovered, in the process of investigation, that there are a lot of strong feelings about those beginnings; various people have their own versions of "history." It appears certain to me that at least these three ideas were common already in the 1960's, often within distinct communities which rarely talked to each other: (a) the notion of separating "content and structure" encoding from specifications for [print] processing; (b) the notion of using names for markup elements which identified text objects "descriptively" or "generically"; (c) the notion of using a (formal) grammar to model structural relationships between encoded text objects. Some of these intellectual streams eventually flowed into the standards work where they took a particular canonical shape, and some important intellectual work developed outside the standards arena. How many of the "fundamental" notions of current SGML (ISO 8879:1986) were (first, best) articulated within efforts that may be reckoned as belonging, genetically or otherwise, to "the beginnings of SGML" will probably remain a matter of personal interpretation rather than of public record. If I ever complete the writeup from the materials collected so far, the picture will reveal a somewhat broader base for the "beginnings of SGML" than is documented in other published treatments of this topic to date. -- Robin Cover


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