Part 1: Systems of Documents

Chapters on Documents and Publications; The Nature of Markup; Software Engineering; Implementation Choices; and The Document in Use.

Topics include patterns, design principles, when to use attributes or elements, extending and simplifying SGML/XML, the Top 10 Reasons Why DTDs Fail, a new six-view model of publications, the flow of dependence, data scrubbing, which kinds of documents are difficult for SGML/XML, and design approaches such as reusable components, architectures, waterfalls, spirals, information units, pools, viewpoint analysis, and scenario analyis.

Author's comment: "This part makes the expertise developed over the last 10 years of SGML available to XML developers too, especially all the hard-to-find but useful things that introductory books omit. The book includes much material otherwise only available through ISO, like the 1996 and 1997 extensions to SGML and HyTime. I have tried to avoid material that has been well-treated in other books or which is on the WWW."

Part 2: Document Patterns

Chapters on Common Attributes; The Document Shell; Paragraphs; Sequences; Named Data; Tables; Interactive Systems; Formal Public Identifiers; Data Content Notations; Formal System Identifiers; Embedded Notations; and Organizing and Documenting DTDs.

Topics include architectural forms, lexical typing, regular expressions, common notations, element references, naming and namespaces, fragment interchange, catalogs, and common attributes from HTML, XPtr, TEI, and SGML Extended Facilities.

Author's comment: "Is this a pattern in elements, entities, or processing instructions? That is the first question to ask when creating your own markup language. The recipes in this part help you to fast-track your development."

Part 3: Characters and Glyphs

Chapters on About Characters & Glyphs; Typeface, Script & Language; The Flowering of Coded Character Sets; Them's The Breaks; Special Characters & SDATA; From Characters to Glyphs; and East Asian Issues.

Topics include the ISO Character/Glyph model, sorting and collation, script and language codes, multilingual documents, character encoding, breaks (spaces, words, hyphens, lines), accents, colors, user-defined characters, Japanese Gaiji and Ruby Annotations.

Author's comment: "Characters and words are the foundation of documents and electronic publishing, yet there has not been a thorough treatment of them available until now. Multilingual and East Asian issues are examined, including material never before available in English. I enjoyed writing this part enormously."

Appendixes: Special Characters

Appendixes are ISO Special Characters; HTML Special Characters; TEI Special Characters; and Index of XML Special Characters.

Author's comment: "XML developers will appreciate the permuted index of all the special characters available to them: these include a wealth of typographical marks and dingbats as well as for the world's written scripts."