Related News: [SGML News for 1996] - [SGML News for 1997] - [SGML/XML News for 1998]
December 28, 1995. I have made significant additions and improvements in the database during past week, though infelicities still abound. The bibliography now contains over 1000 references -- enough to get anyone started, I hope. The collection of contact addresses has been greatly augmented, including some new links to Steve Pepper's vendor list in the Whirlwind Guide and to the SGML Open Member's Page where applicable. Several new 'Table of Contents' listings have been added on secondary pages where the information had grown unwieldy. Thanks to everyone who contributed additions/corrections/suggestions for the 'SGML Web Page' in 1995; the rest of you are invited to help in 1996.
I failed to complete a review of Liora Alschuler's new book on SGML (ABCD... SGML: A User's Guide to Structured Information), but I warmly recommend it, especially for potential implementors who want the big picture and understand why it might actually take a thick book to cover the territory. In this vein: I remain convinced that 'SGML' represents a paradigm shift, especially for people who confuse the representation of an object with the object itself. Here we have a saying, a possible manifesto for software development and information representation: "People should not write documents. People should create information; machines should generate documents and answer intelligent questions." Happy New Year to all.
December 27, 1995. Announcement for a new Web site for The SGML BeLux Users' Group - The Belgian and Luxembourgian chapter of the International SGML Users' Group. I have added the link the growing list of national and regional SGMLUG entities which have support on WWW servers. The BeLux server provides access to the online Proceedings of the past two BeLux conferences, and to the SGML BeLux Newsletter. Articles now cited in the bibliographic database include contributions from the following authors: Ellen Adams; Steve Anderson; Hans Christian Arents; Steven Van den Bergh and Lauwrie Stevens; François Chahuneau; Jan Corthouts and Richard Philips; Jacques Deseyne; Steffen R. Frederiksen; Pamela L. Gennusa; Klaus Harbo, et al.; Paul Hermans; Michael J. McNamara; Alan J. Murray. Thank you, SGML BeLux!
December 21, 1995. New entry for the Electronic Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, sponsored by the Consortium for Latin Lexicography. CLL is composed of members from the Classics Department at the University of California at Irvine, the editors of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. "CLL has decided to use the TEI implementation of SGML to tag the TLL database." See the text of the announcement posted to TEI-L, or links in the main entry.
December 21, 1995. New entry for the European Corpus Initiative (ECI). "The European Corpus Initiative (ECI) was founded to oversee the acquisition and preparation of a large multilingual corpus, and supports existing and projected national and international efforts to carefully design, collect and publish large-scale multilingual written and spoken corpora. . . The ECI/MCI corpus has now been published on CD-ROM, and contains almost 100 million words in 27 (mainly European) languages. It consists of 48 opportunistically collected component corpora marked up in [TEI] SGML (to varying levels of detail), with easy access to the source text without markup. Twelve (12) of the component corpora are multilingual parallel corpora with from two to nine sub-corpora."
December 21, 1995. Added a new (minimal) section on Grammar Transduction and Generation, now that I have bibliographic references for the papers of Helena Ahonen (e.g., Generating Grammars for SGML Tagged Texts Lacking DTD and Forming Grammars for Structured Documents: An Application of Grammatical Inference). Note in this connection, too, that researchers in the Electronic Thesaurus Linguae Latinae project plan to follow the line of research used in the OED to transduce a grammar for the document/database. [Note: please send additions for this subsection]
December 21, 1995. Announcement for three new/updated MIME-SGML RFCs, by Ed Levinson. RFC 1872 (The MIME Multipart/Related Content-type), 1873 (Message/External-Body Content-ID Access Type), 1874 (SGML Media Types). See the IETF discussion lists for the broader context, including recent minutes of the MIME-SGML working group.
December 21, 1995. Announcement from Chet Ensign for a January 9, 1996 meeting of the SGML Forum of New York. Topic: "A Docu-Centric Perspective on Databases." Keynote speaker: Sebastian Holst, President, Texcel, USA. [Rescheduled for Tuesday, February 13, 1996, due to snow in New York City.]
December 20, 1995. Announcement for the availability of IBMIDDoc -- IBM's technical documentation DTD. The URL: ftp://ftp.raleigh.ibm.com/pub/guides/ibmiddoc. "IBMIDDoc is defined at three levels: (1) architectural forms define the base semantics; (2) an 'architectural' DTD which defines more than is currently defined in the production DTD; (3) the production DTD, which is called IBMIDDoc." [from the announcement posted to CTS by Wayne Wohler] See further details following, or in the main entry.
"This release of IBMIDDoc is really comprised of two major components: IBMIDDoc DTD, its associated SGML declarations and the character entity declarations (IBMIDDOC.DTD, *.DCL and *.AIX, IDDBKSYM.ENT) and InfoMast DTD and its components (INFOMAST.DTD and IFMCOMMN.DTD).
"IBMIDDoc DTD is the DTD intended for IBM's internal use and reflects the current state of our editing styles, transforms and processing implementation. The documentation we provide also matches this DTD since we use that documentation for instruction and reference within the company.
"InfoMast DTD and its associated files represent the architecture of which IBMIDDoc is an instance. Both DTDs have been parameterized. The intent was not to facilitate the modification of the base DTD as to ease the writing of the DTD although these parameter entities can certainly be used to customize the DTD as desired.
"Both of these DTDs have fixed attributes which give their relationships to a set of HyTime architectural forms. We are working on updating these forms and their documentation and will release them on this disk when they are available and up-to-date." [from the README]
December 18, 1995. Added a special link [http://www.sil.org/htbin/sgml-index.com] for searching the entire document database of "The SGML Web Page". The VMSIndex utility allows a few booleans and wildcards. The hot link for searching will be placed at the top of all primary documents in the database.
December 18, 1995. Added entry for MetaMorphosis (MetaMorphosis-free), a "modular, programmable tree transformer. . . used to convert any valid SGML instance to any other format, including SGML, arbitrary word processor formats, formats for hypertext systems, database tables, etc. MetaMorphosis has three main modules: (1) a workflow system which is highly configurable; (2) the MetaMorphosis kernel which in itself has a modular architecture [source tree generator, binary tree reader, tree transformer, tree annotator], and (3) a set of output processors." See also the earlier announcement for MetaMorphosis-free.
December 18, 1995. Added entry for the HTI American Verse Project. See the text of the original announcement by John Price-Wilkin, or link to the main entry in the database. "The American Verse Project is a collaboration between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American verse. Most of the archive is made up of 19th century poetry, although a few early 20th century texts are included. The full text of each volume is being converted into digital form and coded in Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) using the TEI Guidelines . . . second goal of the project is to provide a service to scholars by advancing their ability to use Web documents in their work . . ."
December 11, 1995. David Sklar of EBT announced the availability of a new version of Rainbow Maker. Version 2.01 now replaces version 2.0, which was released in April, 1995. Rainbow Maker supports RTF (for documents from MacWord (>=5.x), WinWord (2.x/6.x), Interleaf ASCII, and MIF. Binaries for version 2.01 are available for DOS/Windows (Windows 3.1, NT, Win '95), Sun 4, Sun 5, and (by special request) HP and AIX. Mention is also made of a forthcoming WordPerfect 5.x Rainbow Maker. See the text of the announcement, or link to the FTP server: ftp://ftp.ebt.com/pub/nv/dtd/rainbow at EBT.
December 09, 1995. Announcement for a new version of the SGMLS.pm package, by David Megginson. "This package consists of a collection of perl5 modules for post-processing the output of James Clark's SGMLS and NSGMLS parsers -- they give you the full power of perl5 (object-oriented code, disk-based indices, etc) together with the power of an SGML document. Highlights in the package include the following: (1) The sgmlspl program, which converts an SGML document to another format using a simple specification; (2) The skel.pl specification for sgmlspl, which generates specification templates automatically from your SGML document; (3) The SGMLS::Output module, which allows stack-based redirection of output to strings, file handles, files, pipes, or nul; (4) [NEW!] The SGMLS::Refs module, which maintains a database of forward references from one pass to another (much like a LaTeX .aux file); (5) The SGMLS module, which gives you full, low-level access to the document; (6) [NEW!] The sgmls.el mode for Emacs 19, which allows you to run (n)sgmls and a post-processor such as sgmlsasp or sgmlspl on an SGML document in one buffer and see the output appear in another; (7) Full SGML documentation (DocBook), with facilities for producing HTML, LaTeX, and Postscript versions using the SGMLS.pm package; (8) [NEW!] POD documentation built into the modules (after installation, just type 'perldoc SGMLS')". See the full text of the announcement, or link to the WWW server for more information (documentation) and for the software.
December 09, 1995. Announcement for a new version or Earl Hood's perlSGML. perlSGML is a collection of Perl programs and libraries for processing SGML documents: dtd.pl (2.2.0) -- A Perl library to parse SGML DTDs; dtd2html (1.4.0) -- An SGML DTD documentation/navigation tool; dtddiff (1.1.0) -- List changes in a DTD; dtdtree (1.2.0) -- Generate content hierarchy trees of SGML elements; sgml.pl (0.1.0) -- A Perl library to parse SGML instances; stripsgml (0.1.1) -- Remove SGML markup. Changes: (1) Fixed code so it will run under Perl 4 and 5; (2) MS-DOS usage support; (3) Entity map file syntax has changed to the SGML open catalog format; (4) Support for the envariables SGML_SEARCH_PATH, SGML_CATALOG_FILES; (5) New functions added; (6) Speed improvement; (7) Bug fixes. See the text of the announcement, or link to the WWW page. Or fetch the package.
December 07, 1995. Added entry for the The Canterbury Tales Project. The Canterbury Tales Project is sponsored by the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford under the leadership of Project Director Professor N. F. Blake, Executive Officer Dr Peter Robinson, and Principal Transcriber Dr Elizabeth Solopova. The new electronic edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is being published on CD-ROM by Cambridge University Press. The latest prototype uses the DynaText browser from Electronic Book Technologies. DynaText displays SGML documents and supports a rich set of searching, hypertext linking, and structured document navigation features based upon the SGML markup. In the production of the CD-ROM, the Collate program is used to to carry out the text collations, and then to generate all the collations and spelling databases in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Collate is also used to convert the witness files into SGML.
December 07, 1995. Announcement for an updated version of DTD Fragments, snapshot 0.3b1. "DTD Fragments is an SGML formatter. DTD Fragments operates by first mapping arbitrary DTD elements to intermediate, generic elements and then formatting the generic elements to a requested output format. . .DTD Fragments is not specific to any DTD. Adding support for specific instances of DTDs can be done very quickly by mapping only the elements used in those DTDs. Support for a lot of DocBook and LinuxDoc and some TEI Lite is currently included. Output formatting currently includes ASCII, HTML, RTF, and TROFF. DTD Fragments differs from gf, sgmlspl, ASP, LinuxDoc/qwertz, and some others by not being DTD specific and/or not requiring mapping from an input DTD directly to output formats (HTML, TROFF)." See the text of the announcement or fetch the package directly via FTP.
December 07, 1995. Announcement for SGMLC, with free compiler and runtime processor. "SGMLC is an SGML document processing language which is based extensively upon the C programming language. Programs, or 'rules files', are written in SGMLC using any text editor. They are then compiled into object form by the SGMLC compiler. There are several versions of the SGMLC compiler, ranging from a basic free one to the complete SGMLC Application Development Environment, which incorporates an interactive debugger, C language DLL interface, and system customisation facilities. The resulting object file may then be freely distibuted to anyone who has the free SGMLC runtime processor. An SGML document is processed by simply opening it in the runtime processor and applying the relevant rules file." See the full text of the announcement.
November 30, 1995. Announcement for Microstar's new product NEAR & FAR Author. See the text of the announcement posted to CTS, or link to the product description on Microstar's WWW server. According to Microstar, NEAR & FAR Author offers "a quick, graphical way to edit structured documents and format and print existing SGML documents in your familiar Microsoft Word 6.0 environment. Whether you want SGML authoring, or simply want to ensure document consistency through structured templates, NEAR & FAR Author is for you. . . Starting with a document model (SGML DTD), NEAR & FAR Author automatically creates a matching template and lets you modify the model to utilize existing styles. This template is then used in the authoring of the document."
November 30, 1995. Added entry for MULTEXT (Multilingual Text Tools and Corpora) and MULTEXT-EAST (Multilingual Texts and Corpora for Eastern and Central European Languages). These projects are spin-offs from the Text Encoding Initiative.
November 30, 1995. Added entry for Project ELVYN: Implementing an Electronic Version of a Journal. Project ELVYN is a research project funded by the British Library Research and Development Department (BLR&DD) in cooperation with the Institute of Physics Publishers (IoPP) to look at how publishers and libraries can work together to provide an electronic version of a printed journal. The project involves a number of academic institutions in the UK and Europe. Several participating institutions use SGML and HTML in document management and delivery.
November 30, 1995. Added entry for HyperLib (Hypertext Interfaces to Library Information Systems), a EC funded collaborative project of the Loughborough University of Technology Information (UK) and the University of Antwerp (B). The technology of the project is based on SGML, WWW and HTML. The complete online documentation (including a report on the HyperLib DTD design and on the conversion from SGML to HTML) can be found at http://www.ua.ac.be/docstore.html
November 18, 1995. Added entry for the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Document Architectures Research Unit, where SGML research includes participation in the CAPS, HARMONY, MATHS, and DigiBook projects. Some of these researches are financed under the Technology Initiative for Disabled and Elderly people (TIDE) programme sponsored by the Directorate-General XIII for Telecommunications, Information Industries and Innovation of the E.U. In connection with this added entry, information on the CAPS and HARMONY projects has also been updated.
November 15, 1995. A new entry for ELVIS - Elektronisches Literaturverzeichnis - Informatik für Sehgeschädigte. The ELVIS WWW server hosts a number of services and information resources relevant to SGML/HTML technologies for sight-disabled people (ICADD, CAPS, etc.). Most documents on the server are in German. As of November 1995, an online SGML tutorial was also available. The resources apparently have been collected and developed by Thomas Kahlisch (email: kahlisch@inf.tu-dresden.de).
November 14, 1995. A major new entry in the "Academic Applications" area for Project Opéra (Outils pour les documents électroniques, recherche et applications), a cooperative research endeavor focused on tools for electronic documents. Important work in France has been inadequately represented in this database: with the added entry for Project Opéra and several bibliographic entries in the bibliography database, I hope to have rectified the oversight. A wide range of SGML-based or SGML-related research has been conducted for the past 10 years within French universities and government laboratories. Many theoretical papers and design documents have now been made available on the Internet, and the commercial products (the Grif SGML editor; Symposia) are visible proof of the success of these researches. Grif SA (a technical association of INRIA) has commercialized SGML-based products built upon the early prototype Grif editor, while parallel development of the structure editor Thot continues as a research effort within Project Opéra.
November 14, 1995. Major additions to the bibliographic database which is part of this larger online SGML database. These additions bring the total number of bibliographic entries to over 900. A significant number of new entries are for documents related to Project Opéra.
November 14, 1995. Announcement for a TEI document written by Lou Burnard explaining the Text Encoding Initiative's scheme for modular DTDs. See the bibliographic entry for details. The document is available in HTML format and as an SGML document. The HTML version "was derived automagically from the version prepared in TEI Lite format for presentation at the Second Language Engineering Conference, London, October 1995." An earlier version of the paper was published as "The Wider Relevance of the Text Encoding Initiative" in OII Spectrum, November 1994.
November 14, 1995. Announcement for an impressive new SGML newsletter: <!ELEMENT - Een uitgave van de SGML Users Group Holland. ISSN: 1382-6670. The inaugural issue of this quarterly newsletter (Number 1, Okt 1995; kindly forwarded by Jan Grootenhuis) is 16 pages in length, complete with color graphics and b/w photographs. Authors for the first issue include Gert Meydam (editorial welcome), Koen Mulder [Wolters Kluwer NV] ("Data-uitwisseling"), Wim Vercouteren ("SGML en het document-produktieproces") , Diederik Gerth van Wijk ("SGML en HTML"), Roelof de Vrij (product review: "3B2", from Advent Publishing Systems), and Jan Grootenhuis (product review: "Near & Far 1.21", from Microstar). The newsletter's first issue introduces several Dutch scholars involved in SGML work. Contact the secretariaat: p/a Nijgh Periodieken, t.a.v Bea van Ette, Postbus 122, 3100 AC Schiedam, Netherlands; tel: 010 - 4 27 41 00; fax: 010 - 4 73 99 11; email [Bea van Ette]: bvette@dds.nl
November 14, 1995. Announcement by NICE technologies for TagPerfect version 1.0. TagPerfect is a configurable RTF to SGML filter. It uses the NICE technologies parser and an RTF conversion program written in Microsoft C++. See a copy of the press release forwarded by Eric van Herwijnen, or link to the product description from Delta Computers.
November 10, 1995. On CTS, Dan Connolly announced a technical report entitled "A Lexical Analyzer for HTML and Basic SGML". See the link: A Lexical Analyzer for HTML and Basic SGML (1995/10/18, mirror). The abstract includes: ". . . We present a self-contained specification of a lexical analyzer that uses automated parsing techniques to handle SGML document types limited to a tractable set of SGML features.". The purpose of the document is to: "(1) refine the notion of "basic SGML document" to the precise set of features used in HTML 2.0; (2) present a more traditional automated model of lexical analysis and parsing for these SGML documents [Dragon]; (3) make a rigorous specification of this lexical analyzer that can be understood without prior knowledge of SGML freely available to the web development community."
November 09, 1995. New entry for STIL - `SGML Transformations in Lisp', developed by Joachim Schrod (Computer Science Department, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany).
"STIL (`SGML Transformations in Lisp') is a style sheet language to create structure-controlled SGML applications. In these applications you have neither access to the DTD nor to the original document source, instead you operate on a tree representation of the document. If you know CoST (the tree mode version) or SGMLSpm, STIL uses the same concept as these style sheet languages. The most obvious difference is the use of Common Lisp instead of Tcl or Perl5.
You define classes for elements that appear in a document, instances of these classes are the inner nodes of the tree. Automatic transformation of attributes to data structures more appropriate in your task domain than simple strings is available. Elaborate handling of PCDATA is supported, too. The document tree is traversed, you can specify operations (`callbacks') that are triggered at certain points in that traversal. Within these callbacks, you have access to the full tree." [from the README, 1995/09/09]
November 09, 1995. Announcement for a new version of 'gf' ('general formatter'), from Gary Houston. Description: "gf is a program which can convert SGML documents conforming to a fewDTDs into other formats -- LaTeX, plain text, RTF and Texinfo. It is written in ANSI C and should be easily portable to computers running some version of Unix (the flex lexical scanner and nsgmls are also required)." See the main entry for further links.
New in version 0.45 (November 1995): (a) "Requires a recent version of nsgmls; (b) The HTML 2.0 materials have been updated to the 19950922 draft; (c) A new configure script produced by Autoconf; (d) Various fixes for bugs discovered over the last 14 months or so."
November 09, 1995. New WWW Home Page for the GCA (Graphic Communications Association). Link directly to the "what's new" page, or the Index page; or see the main GCA entry.
November 08, 1995. Improved HTML links for the Exeter SGML Project, and particularly, for the SGML Software Assessment data. Note that the University of Exeter SGML Project has new leadership (and perhaps funding) under Katherine Fenton, Humanities Computing Development Officer. See also the announcement for renewed intent to provide news about SGML projects.
October 26, 1995 [and November 15, 1995]. Announcement for the availability of a new book on SGML by Liora Alschuler: ABCD... SGML: A User's Guide to Structured Information. London/Boston: International Thomson Computer Press (ITCP), 1995. Extent: 414 pages. ISBN: 1-850-32197-3. Price: US $39.95. See provisionally the press release from the publisher (plain text); see now [November 15, 1995] the online press release at ITCP, with the online Table of Contents and the volume Preface. The Thomson server also provides an online version of Microsoft's Cinemania project, which "demonstrates use of SGML in production of mass-market multimedia, entertainment." See the main bibliographic entry for other details. Liora Alschuler is a consultant with The Word Electric, a company based in Vermont (POB 177, Route 5 & Sanborn Rd., East Thetford, VT 05043, 802/785-2623); email: liora@delphi.com.
October 22, 1995. New entry for the Consortium for Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI), a sixteen-member consortium whose members "have agreed to work cooperatively to solve complex problems relating to the electronic interchange of museum information. CIMI's major focus of effort is project CHIO, a demonstration project on the theme of folkart." SGML is used in structuring and online delivery of information.
October 15, 1995. New entry for the Victorian Women Writers Project, based at Indiana University. Texts are being encoded in SGML conforming to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, using the TEILite.DTD, version 1.6.
October 15, 1995. Report from Mary Mallery on the June 24th meeting of the ACRL E-Text Center Discussion Group Meeting at the American Library Association Meeting, "Putting E-Texts on the Net: Three Perspectives". The four major presenters discussed the role of SGML in data preparation within the library context (University of Virginia, Indiana University, and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities).
October 15, 1995. Entry for the Duke University: Special Collections Library, SGML Finding Aids. Tom LaPorte and Steve Hensen (Director of Planning and Project Development, Special Collections Library; hensen@acpub.duke.edu) have set up Panorama links for SGML-based access to the finding aids collection.
October 15, 1995. Entry for Project PREMIUM (PRoduction of Electronic Materials through International and Uniform Methods), sponsored by Stichting SURF (SURF Foundation) and SURFnet, with close cooperation of faculty at Groningen University. It has a significant SGML emphasis, as described in the project plan.
October 12, 1995. Announcement (on CTS) of a new WWW Page for HyTime, created and maintained by Lloyd Rutledge, Distributed Multimedia Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts - Lowell.
October 12, 1995. New online version of Steve Newcomb's article "SGML Architectures: Implications and Opportunities for Industry." A version of the article first appeared in <TAG>: The SGML Newsletter 8/8 (August 1995) 1-5. See the document summary in the bibliographic entry, or document mirror copy.
October 12, 1995. Entry for the University of Waterloo Centre for the New OED and Text Research. The Centre's research results have been further developed and commercialized by Open Text Corporation based upon the software PAT, GOEDEL, LECTOR, TRUC, etc.
October 11, 1995. New work on DSSSL Conformance levels, the proposed DSSSL Core (formerly "DSSSL Lite"), dsssl-o, dsssl-p, etc. See the archives of the DSSSL-Lite Discussion group, or mirror copies of the relevant (initial) documents: Toward a specification of DSSSL Core [mirror]; Overview: DSSSL Core, [mirror]; DSSSL flow object synopses (part 1 of 2), [mirror]; DSSSL flow object synopses (part 2 of 2), [mirror].
October 10, 1995. Publication of the third issue (29/3) of the CHUM special triple-issue dedicated to TEI-SGML. Articles in this third issue: Steven J. DeRose and David Durand, The TEI Hypertext Guidelines; David Barnard, Lou Burnard, Jean-Pierre Gaspart, Lynne A. Price, C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, and Giovanni Battista Varile, Hierarchical Encoding of Text: Technical Problems and SGML Solutions; D. Terence Langendoen and Gary Simons, Rationale for the TEI Recommendations for Feature-Structure Markup. The three consecutive issues of Computers and the Humanities (CHUM) are guest edited by Nancy Ide and Jean Véronis, with a Preface by Charles Goldfarb. CHUM volume 29, numbers 1-3, 1995. The collection of articles is also to be published as a book, with a volume bibliography, by Kluwer Academic Publishers (see immediately below).
October 10, 1995. Announcement for the book version of the Computers and the Humanities (CHUM) special triple-issue dedicated to TEI-SGML, guest edited by Nancy Ide and Jean Véronis, with a Preface by Charles Goldfarb. For a volume summary, see the bibliographic entry. For references to individual articles (with abstracts), see entries here for issue 29/1, issue 29/2, and issue 29/3 of the corresponding CHUM volume.
October 10, 1995. Announcement for a test version of James Clark's SP SGML parser (NSGMLS) version 0.5 (or 1.0), under the release 4.19. The test release of SP is available as ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/sp-0.4.19.tar.gz. DOS binaries are also available as ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/sp0_4_19.zip Significant changes have been introduced since version 0.4, particularly in the syntax for handling system identifiers: "The new syntax is based on the syntax of formal system identifiers defined in ISO/IEC 10744 (HyTime) Technical Corrigendum 1, Annex D." See the information file ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/sp-0.4.19.NEWS for more, or connect to the WWW server http://www.jclark.com/sp.html.
October 10, 1995. New HTML Page for the Midwest SGML Forum (MWSF).
September 27, 1995. Pointer to a useful page of abstracts for recent IETF drafts on MIMESGML; or see mirror. For other information om MIMESGML, see the database entry.
September 26, 1995. "Call for Participation" for SGML Europe '96. May 12-16, 1996. Munich Park Hotel, Munich, Germany. See the conference entry.
September 22, 1995. Publication of the second issue (29/2) of the CHUM special triple-issue dedicated to TEI-SGML. Articles in this second issue: David Chisholm and David Robey, Encoding Verse Texts; John Lavagnino and Elli Mylonas, The Show Must Go On: Problems of Tagging Performance Texts; Robin Cover and Peter Robinson, Encoding Textual Criticism; Daniel Greenstein and Lou Burnard, Speaking With One Voice: Encoding Standards and the Prospects for an Integrated Approach to Computing in History; Stig Johansson, The Encoding of Spoken Texts; Alan Melby, E-TIF: An Electronic Terminology Interchange Format; Nancy Ide and Jean Véronis, Encoding Dictionaries. The three consecutive issues of Computers and the Humanities (CHUM) are guest edited by Nancy Ide and Jean Véronis, with a Preface by Charles Goldfarb. CHUM volume 29, numbers 1-3, 1995. The collection of articles is also to be published as a book, with a volume bibliography, by Kluwer Academic Publishers. See a copy of the the full Table of Contents.
September 22, 1995. Announcement for a TEI Workshop in Tübingen, by Winfried Bader. "SGML-konforme Textauszeichnung nach den Richtlinien der Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)". 15 - 17 November 1995, Universität Tübingen - Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung. See the text of the announcement, or complete information on the uni-tuebingen WWW server.
September 20, 1995. Details on the SGML Asia-Pacific '95 Conference, Singapore (22-25 October 1995). Keynote speakers are Mr Graham Marshall, Managing Director, Butterworths Asia; James Clark, Consultant and author of numerous SGML parsers; John McFadden, President, Exoterica. Pre-Conference tutorials are being offered by Nick Carr, Sharon Adler, Anders Berglund, James Clark, and Jeff Suttor. See the main conference entry in this database, or link directly to the information page (http://www.iti.gov.sg/conference/sgml95.html).
September 14, 1995. Announcement for a TEI-SGML Workshop at Groningen University, November 21-22, 1995. See the conference entry.
September 14, 1995. Announcement for the Beta version of CoST version 2.0. For details, see a copy of the announcement by Joe English. A draft manual is available in Postscript format [mirror copy, September 14, 1995]. CoST Version 2.0 contains a new query language.
September 04, 1995. Herewith: a pointer to the Internet HTML version of SoftQuad Inc.'s introduction to SGML: The SGML PRIMER. SoftQuad's Quick Reference Guide to the Essentials fo the Standard: The SGML Needed for Reading a DTD and Marked-Up Documents and Discussing Them Reasonably. Copyright (c) 1990, 1991, 1995 SoftQuad Inc.
SoftQuad Inc. deserves our thanks for creating this online edition of the The SGML PRIMER. The paper print version is probably still prettier, but a lot of work has been done using color graphics to make this online version a highly usable SGML introduction. When someone asks for an online crash course in SGML essentials (e.g., "before tomorrow morning at 8:00"), I recommend that you point them to the URLs below.
See: (1) SGML Primer: Introduction, and (2) The SGML Primer: Main Text. See the bibliographic entry or the SoftQuad WWW server for other details. Readers who have an SGML-aware Internet client can also access the SGML version of the The SGML Primer.
September 04, 1995. A new entry for Princeton University's Charrette Project. It is a "complex, scholarly, multi-media electronic archive containing a medieval manuscript tradition -- that of Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, ca. 1180)." The eight primary manuscripts are encoded as diplomatic transcriptions using the TEI-SGML encoding Guidelines. See the Charrette Project entry, or link directly to the Princeton WWW server.
August 29, 1995. New entry for the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus Project (ENPC). Text analysis in this project is based upon TEI/SGML encoding. See the main entry for the ENPC, or some of the related bibliographic entries: Johansson and Ebeling ( = ftp://www.hd.uib.no/pub/corpora/enpc.poznan.ps); Hofland ( = ftp://www.hd.uib.no/pub/corpora/enpc.allc.ps); Johansson, Ebeling and Hofland ( = ftp://www.hd.uib.no/pub/corpora/enpc.lund.ps)
August 29, 1995. Numerous papers and panel presentations at the ACH/ALLC '95 Joint International Conference discussed the use of (TEI) SGML encoding as the basis for text-analysis and corpus linguistics research. The presentations are made available in a collection of extended abstracts, produced at the University of California, Santa Barbara. See (eight sample) bibliographic entries for: Knut Hofland; Gary Simons; Nancy Ide, Jean Véronis, and David Durand; Gregory Murphy, Michael Neuman; David Chesnutt, Ann Gordon, and Michael Sperberg-McQueen; Richard Giordano, Carole Goble, and Gunnel Källgren; Shoichiro Hara and Hisashi Yasunaga.
August 29, 1995. New entry for SGML and STEP in the "Related Standards" page. STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Data) is documented in ISO 10303:1992. NIST and a number of European initiatives visualize the use of SGML in a number of STEP activities, and provisional SGML DTDs have been created for some of this work.
August 29, 1995. Corel Corporation recently joined SGML Open. Corel Ventura 6.0, to be released later this year, will integrate SGML technology from Near & Far (DTD editing) and InContext Systems (structured SGML editing). This on the authority of a press release from Corel, excerpted here. See the fuller document: Welcome to Corel- Press Releases.
August 24, 1995. Added seventeen (17) bibliographic references for [the first installment of] the CHUM special issues dedicated to TEI-SGML. These three consecutive issues of Computers and the Humanities (CHUM) are guest edited by Nancy Ide and Jean Véronis, with a Preface by Charles Goldfarb. CHUM volume 29, numbers 1-3, 1995. The collection of articles is also to be published as a book, with a volume bibliography, by Kluwer Academic Publishers. See a copy of the the Table of Contents. Articles in the first issue: Charles F. Goldfarb, Preface; Nancy Ide and Michael Sperberg-McQueen, The Text Encoding Initiative: Its History, Goals, and Future Development; C. M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard, The Design of the TEI Encoding Scheme; Lou Burnard, What is SGML and How Does It Help; Harry Gaylord, Character Representation; Richard Giordano, The TEI Header and the Documentation of Electronic Texts; Dominic Dunlop, Practical Considerations in the Use of TEI Headers in Large Corpora. For bibliographic details and abstracts all articles, see entries in the bibliography documents dated to "[CR: 19950823]".
August 07, 1995. New bibliographic entries for individual articles in a special issue of TEXT Technology, dedicated to the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). The issue is edited by Lou Burnard, and bears the title Electronic Texts and the Text Encoding Initiative. This special issue (Autumn 1995) has contributions on TEI-SGML by: Eric Johnson; Lou Burnard [the "Introduction"]; Jeffery Triggs; John Price-Wilkin; Susan E. Kruse; Laurent Romary, Nathalie Mehl, and David Woolls; James K. Tauber; Syd Bauman; C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. See also the main bibliographic entry for the special issue.
August 07, 1995. Announcement for Inside &Out, a graphical editor for building SGML DTDs interactively. The graphical presentation of the DTD generated by Inside &Out is a syntax (or railroad) diagram. The software runs on a PC with MS-Windows 3.1. The package (version 0.9) is available via FTP from ftp.igd.fhg.de. For further details, see the text of the posting making the announcement.
August 07, 1995. Announcement for MetaMorphosis-free, the free version of MID's MetaMorphosis. MetaMorphosis is a tree-based conversion system for SGML document instances (MM). MM is a tree transformer and annotator that uses the ESIS representation of document instances. It is used to convert SGML document instances to any other format such as arbitrary word-processor formats, formats used in hypertext systems, database tables, and of course SGML. The software (for Linux) is available from the SGML Repository (Oslo) FTP server: ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/Demo/mm-free.tar.gz. For further details, see the text of the posting making the announcement.
July 24, 1995. Major upgrade to the SGML bibliography in this database, adding about 200 new entries. The bibliography database now has over 700 entries. Some added entries are not for recent literature, but have been brought forward from earlier versions of the database. On an experimental basis, I am adding a creation date for added entries (e.g., "[CR: 19950716]" ), in easily searchable date format.
July 21, 1995. Herewith: a deservedly more visible pointer to 'TEI Lite'. Researchers who may have been put off initially by the TEI's elaborate use of parameter entities and driver files (necessary to initialize a full TEI setup) should return now to have a look at the much simpler TEI Lite. It is a "small but usable subset of the TEI main DTD" that avoids some of the complexities in full TEI DTD. The documentation for TEI Lite (in SGML and HTML format) is superb, making the TEI accessible to a much wider audience. Whereas the official P3 reference manual weighs in at 1200 pages, TEI Lite is nicely presented in a 200K HTML document. See: (1) "TEI Lite: An Introduction to Text Encoding for Interchange", or (2) an even smaller subset, "Bare Bones TEI: A Very Very Small Subset of the TEI Encoding Scheme", or (3) TEI Tutorials and Introductory Materials. The TEI Lite DTD itself: FTP from UIC or FTP from OTA. Other helpful tutorial materials are being produced by the TEI editors, Michael Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard.
July 21, 1995. Announcement for 'Near & Far Lite' (SGML) document model viewer from Microstar Software Ltd. "With NEAR & FAR Lite, users can easily view and explore document models including those created with NEAR & FAR's intuitive tree-like structure." [from the promo sheet]
July 18, 1995. FIGleaf 1.0. Free (freely distributable, not for commercial purposes) WWW graphics browser that reads CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile) files. May be used as helper application with HTTP clients. "It can also view TIFF, GIF, CCITT Group 4, Sun Raster, PPM, BMP, EPSI, JPEG, and a few other file formats. It has simple zoom in and zoom out functions, as well as scrolling." From Carberry Technology, as a free version of CADleaf. The URL: http://www.ct.ebt.com/figleaf.html, or ftp://ftp.ct.ebt.com/pub/figleaf1.0
July 18, 1995. Thanks (apparently) to the efforts of Charles Goldfarb, Steve Newcomb, and others, a DIS text for SMDL, "Standard Music Description Language" is available for review. SMDL is defined in ISO/IEC 10743. The current draft version (PostScript version) is 49 pages. Both PostScript and PDF versions are available from the WG8 FTP server: ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/WG8/SMDL/10743.pdf (245653 bytes), or ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/WG8/SMDL/10743.ps (257383 bytes). An overview taken from the DIS in HTML is provided here. See also the main bibliographic entry, or the newly-created SMDL entry.
July 14, 1995. Link to an overview document on SGML that's definitely not new -- but I had lost the pointer. It's a very usable short description of SGML in non-technical language. From the Exeter SGML Project: What is SGML and Why Should I Use It?. See the link to Exeter, or the document in mirror copy on the local WWW server. Probably written by Michael Popham and Paul Ellison (who did a fine job with the SGML Project as long as funding was available).
July 14, 1995. Brief description of the English Poetry Full-Text Database and other databases developed and marketed by Chadwyck-Healey. The English Poetry database and Chadwyck-Healey's massive Patrologia Latina database use TEI-SGML encoding. For PCs, a modified version of EBT's DynaText SGML searching and browsing engine serves to deliver the electronic text. The databases are also available for delivery via networks. See the database entry based upon description of the English Poetry database installed at the University of Virginia, and additional descriptions of C-H databases. Chadwyck-Healey plans to have a dedicated Web site soon.
July 14, 1995. Link to the `REPRESENTATIVE POETRY' Project, University of Toronto. "Representative Poetry is available on-line in the World-Wide Web front page of the University of Toronto English Library (UTEL). It is encoded in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and is converted on the fly to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for Web browsers. The encoded collection is part of the TACT manual to be published by the Modern Language Association in 1995." See the database entry for Representative Poetry here.
July 12, 1995. Link to a new home page for CELLAR, "Computing Environment for Linguistic, Literary, and Anthropological Research," sponsored by SIL's Department of Academic Computing. The project technical brief and most of the articles discuss SGML or illustrate its use as part of CELLAR's notion of an encoding model (import and export). Parsers defined on CELLAR classes know how to create objects by importing instances encoded in SGML, and view definitions for CELLAR objects allow generation of SGML (e.g., TEI-SGML) views of CELLAR's textual objects (documents or databases). SGML thus plays a supporting but not central role in CELLAR, which is a full computing environment and not a markup language. See information the main CELLAR page.
July 12, 1995. Announcement for a special triple-issue of Computers and the Humanities (CHUM), dedicated to the Text Encoding Initiative's application of SGML (TEI-SGML). The special issue editors are Nancy Ide and Jean Veronis, with a Preface by Charles Goldfarb. To be published also as a book (Kluwer Academic Publishers). See the Table of Contents.
July 12, 1995. Link to description of Project ELSA (Electronic Library SGML Applications). ELSA is a project funded through European Commission DG XIII, with three major partners: "Jouve System D'Information (France) the lead partner, will provide the search engine, user interface software and client server software, Elsevier Science (Netherlands) will provide the documents and De Montfort University will develop the user interface and provide a test bed." See ELSA's Home Page, or the entry in this database.
July 03, 1995. Announcement for David Megginson's (free) SGMLS.pm: A Post-Processor for SGMLS and NSGMLS. "The main part of this release is a library, SGMLS.pm, which repackages the ESIS output of (N)SGMLS into perl5 objects. On top of this, I have built a script, sgmls.pl, for formatting or processing SGML documents quickly using event patterns." See the database entry for full details.
July 03, 1995. Links to the University College Cork, CURIA Project: Thesaurus Linguarum Hiberniae. The CURIA-TLH project is creating a corpus of medieval and modern Irish texts in machine-readable format using TEI-SGML encoding. See the main entry for details and URLs.
July 03, 1995. Announcement for Publishing Development AB's "free SGML Companion(TM) DTD-browser to be available on World Wide Web." See the text of the announcement, or the advertised online description.
June 28, 1995. Report on the fourth CETH (Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities) Summer Seminar, by Michael Sperberg-McQueen. As usual, TEI/SGML was featured in the seminar courses. See the text of the report or the main conference entry.
June 27, 1995. A small collection useful of Home Pages created by throughtful people. Please send me email if you have a WWW Home Page that could be surfed profitably by someone in search of SGML-related information. (Email: robin@utafll.uta.edu).
June 27, 1995. Updated URLs for a new version of Steve Pepper's valuable resource, The Whirlwind Guide to SGML Tools and Vendors. See the bibliographic entry if you wish. In any case, links need to be updated for the hypertext/HTML version [http://www.falch.no/~pepper/sgmltool/] and for the text edition [ftp://ftp.falch.no/pub/sgmltool/sgmltool.txt].
June 27, 1995. Announcement from James D. Mason concerning a new WG8 Web Service: Document Description and Processing Languages. See the new entry for WG8 in this database, or the main WG8 URL: http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/WG8/wg8home.htm. The WWW server augments the WG8 FTP server: ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/WG8.
Extract: "ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 is a component of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18, a subcommittee of JTC1, which is a collaborative effort of both the International Organization for Standards and the International Electrotechnical Commission. Scope and Terms of Reference: To produce standards for languages and resources for the description and processing of compound and hypermedia documents, including:
- Standard Generalized Markup Language and support facilities
- Document processing architecture and formatting for documents represented in SGML
- Final-form document architecture and Standard Page Description Language
- Font architecture, interchange format, and services
- Hypermedia document structuring language and application resources"
June 16, 1995. A collection of nine (9) new bibliography entries for pertinent articles in OCLC's Annual Review of OCLC Research, 1994. Entries may be found under the authors' last names in the bibliographic database, where abstracts or summaries are given. Or you may want to link directly to the Table of Contents page for the volume. Articles are by: Thomas B. Hickey ("OCLC's Participation in the TULIP Project" and "OCLC's Participation in the TULIP Project"); Yuri Rubinsky ("SGML to Braille, Large Print, and Audio"); Keith E. Shafer ("Manipulating Tagged Text", and "Translating Mathematical Markup for Electronic Journals"); Diane Vizine-Goetz ("Spectrum: A Web-Tool for Describing Internet Resources"); Bradley C. Watson ("Converting ACM Authors' Articles to SGML"); Stuart L. Weibel ("Scholarly Publishing on the World Wide Web", and "The Design and Implementation of XSCEPTER, an X-Windows Graphical User Interface to the CORE Project").
June 15, 1995. Announcement for a special issue of Text Technology dedicated to TEI/SGML (edited by Lou Burnard). See the bibliographic entry here, or connect directly to Eric Johnson's WWW server for the announcement: Something new under the Sun: Electronic Texts and the Text Encoding Initiative; for background and TEI summary on the same server: The Text Encoding Initiative (by Eric Johnson).
June 13, 1995. A new entry for SPDL (Standard Page Description Language) and a slightly upgraded entry for DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language) just preceding the SPDL pointers.
June 13, 1995. Bibliographic reference for documentation on a new version of the Elsevier Science Full-Article DTD. Interesting: have a look at the documentation available online (in PostScript.
June 13, 1995. The American Physical Society's (APS) open discussion of SGML. See provisionally http://publish.aps.org/, a copy of the discussion group charter, or The American Physical Society (APS) and the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) [mirror copy here ]. Excerpt: "SGML is the center piece of the APS strategy to accept manuscripts electronically and to provide storage and delivery choices. With the advent of software, it is becoming feasible to make the SGML files of individual articles available for viewing. It is believed that, if we as publishers can agree on some degree of SGML standardization, the authors and readers will benefit. A common SGML approach will facilitate ease of integration of papers from multiple publishers at the library or reader level. A common SGML approach will facilitate the development of many authoring tools and reading choices." [Bob Kelly]
June 10, 1995. Electronic archive for the Journal of Electronic Publishing (University of Michigan Press, ISSN 1080-2711) in which articles are archived in SGML format. Search and retrieval is made possible using Open Text's PAT search engine. The articles are searchable online as full text, or by searching in specified data fields (author, title, subject, abstract). Articles may be downloaded in SGML and HTML format. The DTD used for the JEP articles is available at ftp://www.press.umich.edu/htdocs/jep/article.dtd. It is a minor variant (proper subset) of the ISO 12083 Article DTD. Versions of the documents are also being made available experimentally in Panorama-SGML format. For access to the archive using standard HTML, use http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/. Contact: Colin Day (colinday@umich.edu) or Lorrie LeJeune (lorrie@umich.edu) at the University of Michigan Press.
June 03, 1995. Links and bibliographic entries for three recent papers on MIME-SGML. See the cover letter, or the bibliographic entries for the three documents, (1) by Ed Levinson, (2) by Ed Levinson, and (3) by Ed Levinson and James Clark.
June 03, 1995. Upgraded recognition of the excellent coverage of SGML publishing software by Seybold Publications, Inc. in Seybold Report on Publishing Systems and the associated Seybold Special Report series. See the new entry for SRPS in the serials page.
June 02, 1995. Major new entry on use of SGML by The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). See the linked entry here or just connect to the DOE/OSTI Electronic Exchange Reading Room.
June 02, 1995. Finland SGML Info Site. "Index Information Technologies Oy - Index IT Experts in documentation Spesialized in SGML" [in Finnish]. See their main page.
May 22, 1995. "Synex Information AB Announces Synex ViewPort. New SGML/HyTime toolkit adds SGML browsing to any application... The ViewPort engine parses and displays any fragment of an SGML document on-the-fly without precompilation. Documents may even be assembled at runtime and browsed instantly... " See the full description of Synex ViewPort at http://www.pi.se/synex/viewport.html or at http://www.pi.se/synex/pr/vp-pr.html.
May 22, 1995. 100 new bibliography entries in the SGML bibliography section of this database, and about 15 entries updated. Approximately 50 other files updated.
May 20, 1995. Grif Symposia: "Towards a New Era in SGML Authoring on the Web." Grif Symposia is still in beta. Its claim: "Now Anyone Can Edit SGML Documents on the Web!. . . Grif Symposia from GRIF S.A. is the first ever WYSIWYG structured document authoring tool to allow you to view and edit SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) documents on the World Wide Web." See description and alternate links: (1) http://symposia.inria.fr/ or (2) Symposia- Welcome.
May 20, 1995. IADS [Integrated Authoring and Display System] Version 2.0. See the announcement or the more detailed README file. Available from the SGML Repository or from the Exeter FTP Server. Questions: Susan Pape (Email: spape@redstone-emh1.army.mil).
May 20, 1995. New HyTime Guide: publicly available HyTime Application Development Guide, by Ralph Ferris and Victoria Newcomb. See the full bibliographic entry and the announcement by the author. The document is available on the Internet via anonymous FTP.
May 18, 1995. First Freeware SGML Viewer for the World Wide Web (Panorama). See the public announcement and the Information Page: The Wider World of SGML on the Web. The Panorama press release is available in HTML format on the SoftQuad WWW server. The free version and documentation are available from sites in Sweden as well as from US/Canadian sites. If you already have Panorama, link here.
May 18, 1995. An authoritative WWW site for TEI information. A related development is the recent creation of "TEI Lite": see ftp://ftp-tei.uic.edu/pub/tei/lite/lite14.dtd or similarly. The UK FTP site for TEI (OTA) also has an online copy of the "Lite" DTD: ftp://ota.ox.ac.uk/pub/ota/TEI/dtd/teilite.dtd. Watch the WWW site above for announcements and further developments.
