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From: yuri@sq.sq.com (Yuri Rubinsky)
Subject: Latest SGML Year in Review
Message-ID: <1994Nov14.205924.7437@sq.sq.com>
Summary: 12 months of highlights in SGML implementation
Keywords: SGML application implementation publishing
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 94 20:59:24 GMT
Lines: 292
The SGML Year in Review -- 1994
By Tommie Usdin, ATLIS Consulting Group
and Yuri Rubinsky, SoftQuad Inc.
being the text of a speech given at the GCA SGML '94 Conference
November 7, 1994 -- Tyson's Corner, Virginia, USA
(C) 1994 by Yuri Rubinsky and B. Tommie Usdin
This posting may be reproduced in whole or in part provided the copyright
and this notice are included.
In previous years, the Year in Review has been a detailed description of
SGML projects, products, and events. It has chronicled major commercial
implementations, industry initiatives, and software products. This
year there are simply too many projects, products, and successes to
discuss them all. Instead we will discuss a few highlights, and some
trends.
Standards
DSSSL: When was that last time we talked about the year
in SGML without talking about DSSSL? DSSSL, the Document
Style Semantics and Specification Language, the companion
to SGML for formatting and transformation, has been
largely re-written, and is out for balloting.
Reconciliation of comments will take place at the January
1995 meeting which has been scheduled for February.
Interested parties are optimistic. [Since the SGML Conference,
an SGML Open technical committee, including experts from the
ISO DSSSL committee, has begun work on defining a minimal
subset of the formatting part of DSSSL such as would be
appropriate for online delivery including World Wide Web SGML
and HTML browsers. That work will be submitted to the HTML IETF
Working Group and relevant lists for discussion.]
Conformance Testing : International Standard ISO/IEC
13673, Conformance Testing for Standard Generalized
Markup Language has been approved and is being prepared
for publication. ISO 13673 is based on American National
Standard ANSI X3.190-1992.
Another Conformance Testing note: NIST (the United States
National Institute for Standards and Technology) is in
the process of setting up a conformance testing process
for software that claims to conform to the United States
SGML Federal Information Processing Standard.
STEP: In the last couple of Year in Review
presentations, we have mentioned ISO 10303, the
collection of standards for design and manufacture in
CAD/CAM systems called STEP. Within the last six months,
that community has suddenly perked up and appears headed
to try to tackle the complex relationships between
product data and SGML.
TEI: Text Encoding Initiative has published P3, the
1,300 page TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding
and Interchange. Years and years of work have resulted
in a formal document type definition for the textual
features most important to the use of electronic text in
academic research.
Major Initiatives
Three major initiatives are out of development mode, and entering
testing and implementation: DocBook, Pinnacles, and ATA.
DocBook: Version 2.2 of the DocBook application for
computer documentation has been released. Version 2.3,
which will be relapsed soon, will be modular and
parameterized for easy subsetting and extension.
Pinnacles: Version 1.1 of the Pinnacles Component
Information Standard for the interchange of technical
information in the electronic components industry is now
at the printer. PCIS is intended to facilitate the
creation of electronic databooks and the interchange of
reusable product data. Initial implementations are
currently under development, and a rigorous testing will
begin in early 1995. [The final document appeared from the
printer in time to be waved about at the closing session of the
conference.]
The Electronic Databook initiative sponsored by the
Japan Database Research committee--effectively the
Japanese Pinnacles Group--is holding its second session
this month and working groups have been formed.
Airline: The airline industry is moving from design of
interchange standards into implementation of those
standards. Boeing, Airbus, Pratt & Whitney, General
Electric, and Rolls Royce have programs completed or
nearing completion to provide data in SGML format to
customer airlines. Two airlines, Deutsche Lufthansa and
United Airlines have systems for maintenance data in SGML
nearing completion. Many other airline systems are in
various stages of development.
Pharmaceutical: The drug regulatory agencies of Canada,
the United States, Sweden, Australia, and the
Netherlands, are creating standardized DTDs for Chemistry
(Quality) Submissions. The group first met in January,
and recently completed document analysis. They have
identified DTD finalization, format (style) requirements,
instance markup, prototype development and demonstration
as their next tasks.
News: In the News Industry, an effort to create a
Universal Text Format for on-line, broadcast, print, and
archival news is being coordinated by a joint committee
of the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications
Council) and the NAA (Newspaper Association of America).
ICADD: In Europe the work of the International Committee
for Accessible Document Design has been extended. The
European Commission is funding dissemination of
information about the TIDE (Technology Initiative for the
Disabled and Elderly) pilot projects to deliver
electronic newspapers to blind people and to build a
fully accessible workstation.
SGML Open: SGML Open, the non-profit, international
Consortium of suppliers whose products and services
support SGML, reports several milestones accomplished in
1994:
1. A 20% increase in sponsor membership and the
enrollment of six associate members.
2. The adoption of the Consortium's first technical
resolution, which describes a standard convention for
handling SGML entity references. Three Consortium
members - Exoterica, James Clark, and SoftQuad - have
already incorporated the entity management scheme
into their software.
3. The establishment of the SGML Open WWW Server on
the Internet The URL is http://www.sgmlopen.org.
In addition to these major accomplishments, the
consortium also formed new technical committees on
the table interchange issues and SGML and the
Internet; launched the first phase of its market
research project; held a two and a half day,
membership only event called the "SGML Open Summer
Camp"; and had a significant presence at the WWW
Conference in Chicago last month.
Government and Commercial
Singapore: One government has made an enormous
commitment to SGML. The government of Singapore recently
hosted the SGML Asia/Pacific conference. The Singapore
Ministry of Defense announced that it will be
incorporating SGML into its EDI system as a means of, for
example, incorporating the text and graphics of detailed
product specifications into purchase orders.
Singapore media provided extensive coverage of SGML Asia-
Pacific, including an article on Singapore Business
Times, and interview with Charles Goldfarb in IDG's
ComputerWorld Singapore, and a segment on television news
describing the conference.
SGML Industry News
WWW: From out of the blue, there is now a new category
of software products; browsers, authoring tools,
databases, and spiders, all related to the World Wide
Web. A number of these were on display at the vendor
tabletops at SGML '94.
SGML Databases: There has been talk about the need for,
the requirement of, and the design of SGML database
products for a few years. There are now several very
interesting SGML database tools commercially available,
and others under development.
Microsoft: Another major main-stream software player has
announced support of SGML. Microsoft's announcement of
an SGML product is significant both because of their
visibility in the non-SGML community, and because they
seem to understand the relationship between SGML and word
processing. One of the most appealing aspects of
Microsoft's announcement is that they do not claim to
solve the whole problem of SGML authoring with a word-
processor add-on, but instead have a tool that will be
useful under a particular set of circumstances for some
users - I would hope, in fact, to a large number of
users.
Labor shortage: The SGML industry is suffering from a
shortage of experienced SGML people; several companies
have announced that they are recruiting at this
conference, and many others are doing it a bit more
quietly.
Miscellany
SGML on the Web: In the Miscellaneous category, and of
major significance to this community, is a passing
statement by Ira Goldstein, co-chair or the recent World
Wide Web Conference, who, in his remarks to the assembly
simply took as a given that the future of the Web would
include SGML.
His statement is the result of a lot of work by people
who straddle both the Web and the SGML communities, in
particular Dan Connolly of HAL Software, who first re-
wrote the HTML guidelines as an SGML DTD; and Dave
Raggett of Hewlett Packard, who is editor of the next
generation of HTML, known as HTML 3.0.
Within the last six months, the ad hoc group of HTML
implementors who were working on formalizing HTML have
been reconstituted as an Internet Engineering Task Force
Working Group. Their work will be presented and we
hope will be balloted and approved shortly after the
next IETF meeting in December. The good news for SGML
users is that any SGML software will be able to read and
work with HTML.
HTML in Use: The Santa Cruz Operation has announced
and demonstrated an SGML-based online documentation and
help system based on NCSA Mosaic. This is particularly
important because it is a highly sophisticated, and
successful, HTML implementation.
SGML in Prison: Is tagging documents more fun than
working on a chain gang? The Maximum Security Federal
Women's Prison in Louisville KY is tagging documents for
the Library of Congress' American Memory project.
PDF as a FIPS: A newsworthy controversy erupted recently
revolving around a proposal from the US National
Institute of Standards and Technology to turn Adobe's
proprietary (albeit published) Portable Document Format
into a US Federal information Processing Standard
entitled, by coincidence, a Portable Document Format.
Howls from Adobe's competitors, from SGML Open, and from
ICADD may have slowed down the process.
HyTime Conference: The first annual HyTime conference
took place this past summer in Vancouver, British
Columbia to rave reviews. HyTime is clearly becoming
realer and realer with two HyTime products on the market,
one published and one imminent HyTime book, and with
major applications under development IBM's IBMIDDOC,
Electriciti de France, US DoD IETMs, and the activity of
the Committee for the Application of HyTime who are
creating a DTD for DTDs,' and establishing mechanisms to
track licensing, copyright, security, and topic
relationships within electronically published works. The
CApH committee has reached consensus on the CApH base
module and topic navigation module and will be publishing
soon.
Seybold Conference: The Seybold conferences, which
have in the past concentrated on format-based publishing
technologies, have included passing references to SGML
for several years. This year SGML was embraced quite
warmly. Yuri preached SGML on the closing panels in both
March and September, the September conference included an
SGML tutorial, and there were about a dozen SGML tool
vendors in the exhibit hall, all of whom were very busy.
Xanadu: At the Seybold conference a month ago I ran into
Ted Nelson, the man who coined the word HyperText so long
ago, and he admitted that he had finally figured out
exactly how to use SGML with the XANADU project that he's
been working on for some 30 years.
No News is Big News: The big news in SGML applications is
that a successful SGML application is no longer news; you
have to do more than make it work to get anyone's
attention. In related news; in the trade magazines now
you see references to SGML with no brackets. The
magazines no longer feel the need to tell their readers
what SGML stands for sort of like COBOL.
Award: We are grateful to Bob Glushko of Passage Systems
for the final news of the year: Winner of the great
headline award goes to one of the imaging newsmagazines:
"SMGL ... A Widely Misunderstood Technology..."
And that is the news. Thank you.