News from the SGML '93 Conferenec
This document (now primarily of historical interest) was originally mirrored from: http://tecnet1.jcte.jcs.mil:8000/htdocs/bboards/CALS/msg..49. It is probably also still available on the Exeter FTP server.
To: *cals
From: young
Posted: Dec 19 00:29 EST (Dec 19 05:29 ZULU)
Cc:
Subject: News from SGML '93
Yuri Rubinsky, the conference chair of SGML '93, put together this
collection of information, along with Tommie Usdin, and they both
delivered the info at the conference like a news broadcast. It was
quite amusing, very quick, and very informative. From it, you can see
just how broad the use of SGML is, beyond the military's application via
28001. I got it from comp.text.sgml.
Debby
---------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 15 Dec 1993 16:18:23 +0000
From: "Yuri Rubinsky" <yuri@sq.sq.com>
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada
Message-ID: <1993Dec15.161823.17021@sq.sq.com>
Keywords: SGML, ISO 8879, applications, news
Summary: recap of major or interesting SGML initiatives and implementations
Subject: The SGML Year in Review for 1993 [long]
The SGML Year in Review -- 1993
by Tommie Usdin, Atlis Consulting Group and Yuri Rubinsky, SoftQuad Inc
being the text of a speech given at the GCA SGML '93 Conference
December 6, 1993 -- Boston, Massachusetts, USA
_________________________________________________________________
(c) Copyright 1993 by Tommie Usdin and Yuri Rubinsky
This document may be reproduced in whole or in part provided that
this copyright notice is reproduced on each copy made.
_________________________________________________________________
As always, we begin this article with a disclaimer: This is a highly
personal whirlwind tour of SGML activities in the last year and includes
only things we've heard about. Thanks to all the individuals who
contributed to this document, either through the Internet, or at the SGML
'93 Conference. Please note that unlike previous year's reports, this one
does not include vendors' announcements of new products.
1. Standards Activity
SGML
The SGML review produced its first interim report in May, which was
published in <TAG>. In addition to reiterating the principle for
future development -- which guarantees that existing SGML documents
will continue to conform -- the report indicated that the review
has progressed sufficiently that participants were comfortable
indicating that they know that changes will be required to SGML.
The group has included an arbitrary non-representation sampling of
requirements in the report. It is important to re-state that this
activity is NOT the five-year review. That traditional ISO routine
event was passed some time ago; The creators of SGML continue to
meet with the SGML user community to consider future development
based on present and anticipated uses.
HyTime
HyTime, whose formal adoption as an International Standard was
announced as the kickoff item in the 1992 Year in Review is gaining
momentum in a variety of places. IBM is incorporating HyTime
structures into its IBMIDDOC DTD (which we'll hear about later in
this talk); TechnoTeacher demonstrated some of the capabilities of
its HyTime engine a few weeks ago at CALS Expo and will be
releasing product in the first half of next year. And it seems at
least three HyTime books are heading towards publication. Yuan-Ze
Institute of Technology and IBM Research have announced the
formation of Project YAO, an international consortium for the
production of free SGML system software. The consortium's first
products are Object SGML, a C++ class library for SGML parsing with
native HyTime support, and POEM, a Portable Object-oriented Entity
Manager. The products are currently in alpha test and shipment is
expected in the first quarter of 1994.
DSSSL
Sharon Adler reports that the second draft of DSSSL will be out by
the end of January and will consist of three levels of complexity
and conformance. It is expected that vendors will be able to move
quite quickly to the first level, which is effectively equivalent
to the screen and print display capabilities of most SGML authoring
and browsing tools. The 2nd level will offer full compatibility
with FOSIs, but, in Sharon's words, "will be better." The 3rd
level will support arbitrarily complex specifications.
ISO 12083
This week marks the formal announcement of ISO 12083, the
much-enhanced and internationalized version of the ANSI/NISO
standard Z39.59-1988, the American National Standard for Electronic
Manuscript Preparation and Markup (also known as the AAP DTD). The
ISO standard differs from the ANSI standard in that all
ambiguities, redundancies and formatting specific aspects of the
original have been removed, element and attribute names and values
have generally been lengthened for increased legibility (within the
limits set by the Reference Concrete Syntax), and simple HyTime and
ICADD constructs -- see separate item below -- have been
incorporated into the DTDs.
Standard Page Description Language
Dr James Mason, convenor of ISO activity in SGML and related
standards, reports that the SPDL now has the authorization to go to
press; the committee is ironing out the small details.
2. User Group Activity
Sweden
The Swedish SGML UG got off to a flying start in August 1993. A
day with Eric van Herwijnen, several Swedish vendors and SGML
pioneers attracted nearly 200 attendees/members.
Northern California
The first meeting of the Northern California SGML UG was held
recently at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif.
Japan
The Japanese SGML Forum sponsored SGML Show '93 for the public and
attracted an audience of 400 for product introductions, an
advanced-user lecture, and product demonstrations. Participating
companies (in alphabetical order) included: Aldus, Electronic Book
Technologies, Fujitsu, Interleaf, Nihon Unitec, and Nissho Iwai.
France
The French SGML UG began in December 1992 in Paris. The President
is Michel Biezunski. More than 35 people took part and included
many people interested in implementing SGML as well as vendors.
The plan is to organize four events each year dedicated to specific
themes, such as one day of user experiences.
Israel
The first chapter located in the Middle East is the Israeli Chapter
which is being organized by Nary Ratberg in Tel Aviv.
SGML SIGhyper
Erik Naggum has succeeded Steve Newcomb as Chairman of the SGML
SIGhyper group, the long name of which is "the SGML Users' Group's
Special Interest Group on Hypertext and Multimedia."
Switzerland
Graham Tritt reports that a successful annual meeting of the SGML
Users Group Switzerland was held in November, with attendance of
35, in his words, most still in the "interest" or "evaluation"
phase.
3. Major Public Initiatives
SGML Open
SGML Open, the consortium of vendors and users, was founded this
year to undertake both technical and marketing activities. With
nearly 40 members, the group is rapidly moving to propose
techniques to support multi-vendor interoperability beyond SGML
itself. Meetings at the end of SGML '93 resulted in the creation
(and beginning activity) of working committees to deal with
creation of marketing materials and specifications for common
support for entity management and handling.
HTML
Following recent meetings at the ACM Hypertext Conference in
Seattle and between the Worldwide Web and TEI communities in Cork,
Ireland, renewed and vigorous interest is being shown in creating a
"seriously useful" DTD for the online browsers for the WWW. An ad
hoc from the ACM meeting has presented a proposed update to HTML
and Dave Raggett of Hewlett Packard (who created HTML) is working
on revision 2, which is known as HTMLplus.
UTF
A joint committee of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) and
the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) continue
to work on a device-independent file format for news service data
transmission based on SGML. This standard, called the Universal
Text Format, was drafted last year and known then as the NIML, or
News Industry Markup Language. UTF is intended to be used in
conjunction with the International Interchange Model, adopted
several years ago by the NAA and IPTC. Most major news services in
North America, Western Europe and Japan are involved, along with a
number of large US newspapers. The working group currently is
refining the UTF proposal to incorporate a DTD for news service
files. The goal is to submit the standard for approval next summer
to the parent organizations.
TEI
The Text Encoding Initiative reports that all major base tagsets
and several additional publications, without the "Draft" status,
are due shortly.
Pinnacles Group
The Electronic Component Industry group takes a giant `baby step'
toward standardization of product information interchange. The
Pinnacles Group, consisting of Hitachi, Intel, National
Semiconductor, Philips Semiconductors, and Texas Instruments, last
week (12/2/93) completed the document analysis and architectural
phase of this effort. DTDs for review are expected in February
1994.
International Committee for Accessible Document Design
Last year, Texas passed legislation which specified SGML and the
ICADD tagset as the favored encoding for mandatory delivery of all
textbooks which have been adopted by the state education
authorities. The electronic files are to be used to create
Braille, large print and synthesized voice versions of the
textbooks for use by the print-disabled. Eighteen other states
have passed similar legislation and are expected to upgrade their
legislation to match that of Texas. Exoterica has announced that
it will make available an ICADD application--for free -- which will
transform any file marked up according to an ICADD-enabled DTD into
the recommended tagset. Berger-Levrault/AIS has announced the
availability of similar support in its Balise software.
Davenport Group
The Davenport Group discovered that it had at least two
crash-priority agendas that were competing for the attention of its
participants, and so it splintered quite amicably into two groups.
The group that kept the name "Davenport" continues to work on the
"DocBook" DTD, in collaboration with the Unix International DocSIG,
which is expected to allow the documentation of Unix (and
Unix-like) software documentation to be entirely portable.
CApH
The other Davenport successor group continues to work on the
development of conventions for the use of HyTime. This group now
functions under the aegis of the Graphic Communications Association
Research Institute, and it is called the "Conventions for the
Application of HyTime" (or "CApH", an acronym which is pronounced
like the first syllable of the word "caffeine"). The meta-DTD that
used to be called "SOFABED" under the aegis of Davenport is now
called "Topic Relationships" under CApH; it suggests ways of
representing indexes and other navigational information using
HyTime. CApH is also developing conventions for using the HyTime
"activity tracking" architectural forms to represent the wishes of
information can be used, for example, after royalty payments,
security clearances, etc.
FUSION
In Canada, a joint venture of government and industry was formed to
promote the CALS vision without reference to the military domain.
The conceptual framework for the initiative has been termed FUSION,
an acronym that stands for the "Focused Use of Standards for
Integrating Organizations and Networks." The prototype
applications currently under development deploy SGML as the central
tool in managing shared information holdings.
New Drug Applications
The US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is skeptical that SGML
will really work for New Drug Applications (NDAs), so a small group
headed by the Graphic Communications Association (GCA) has built a
demonstration Computer Aided New Drug Application (CANDA) using
real drug content. The FDA has agreed to "look at it" and in fact
has people in attendance at this conference. Many pharmaceutical
companies have decided they can't wait, so they're implementing
SGML on their own.
Common Desktop Environment (CDE)
The help system that will be distributed with CDE Unix systems from
six major vendors is based on a SGML file format called SDA.
EDGAR
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is now accepting
corporate filings in SGML as part of its long-awaited second phase
EDGAR -- Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval -- project. By
1995, all public corporations in America will be expected to file
their financial disclosure information this way. Sadly, the DTD is
very limited and shows how the politics of trying to please
absolutely everybody can play havoc with good application design.
Air Transport Association/Aerospace Industries Association
In the ATA world, British Airways reports that it will provide an
SGML solution to handle SGML aircraft maintenance and operational
manuals. Phase I is for introduction into British Airways of the
Boeing 777 in March 95. The German Lufthansa Airlines has released
to field-usage an SGML-based central document management system
using ATA DTDs. The system, which supports any DTD, is named
DocMaint and will be marketed by STEP who developed the system.
Pratt & Whitney is implementing a system to deliver technical
publications in SGML for use in the commercial aviation industry.
The first publication will be available in 1994 for the engine
being developed for the Boeing 777 Aircraft. Aerospatiale, through
the Airbus consortium, began this year to deliver SGML-coded
maintenance and operations manuals to their customers on a routine
basis. The Electronic Library System, in which SGML and associated
standards will play a major role, was launched, with an initial
focus on its ground-based component. Boeing itself has developed
an indexing system for Service Bulletins using tagged Service
Bulletins and created dynamically. This leads to very user
friendly search and navigation path to get to the desired bulletin.
The system was developed under Unix and the materials are
downloaded to PC machines.
4. Recent and Forthcoming Publications
Press Coverage
1. North American coverage of SGML in the mainstream computer press
continues to grow rapidly. Articles have appeared in PC Magazine,
PC Week, MacWeek, Personal Computing, Washington Technology Week,
and Forbes Magazine, among others.
2. The Taiwanese November issue of BYTE includes a piece by Charles
Goldfarb on HyTime.
3. In a highly-directed public relations misfire, SGML was
mentioned on radio in Birmingham, Ala., twice and Bakersfield,
Calif., once by David Silverman of DCL. David reports that no new
business was received as a result of this strategic promotional
activity.
Prentice Hall
Prentice Hall has announced the formation of a new series of books
and multimedia publications: "The Charles F. Goldfarb Series on
Open Information Management." The series will support the
development and deployment of information management solutions
based on open standards such as SGML and HyTime. Initial titles
will address document type design methodology, the benefits of
SGML-based information management solutions, the development of
SGML applications, and the HyTime standard for hypermedia
application development. Under Dr. Goldfarb's guidance, the series
will be geared to information specialists, engineers, IS managers,
systems programmers, and other computer and publishing
professionals seeking to implement open information management
solutions.
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Kluwer Academic Publishers are announcing the Spring 1994
publication of "Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime"
by Steve DeRose of Electronic Book Technologies Inc. and David
Durand of Boston University. "Making Hypermedia Work" is a user's
handbook for representing hypertextual information in SGML. The
book fully describes the most useful parts of HyTime while
providing design guidelines to help users avoid pitfalls and build
effective documents for hypertext and multimedia systems.
Also from Kluwer
Eric van Herwijnen's book "Practical SGML" has gone through ten
printings, and the second edition will be available in February
1994. During the last year an Electronic Book (DynaText
application) version appeared with an SGML parser so you can parse
the examples.
Manager's Guide from VNR
Responding to the fact that the interest in SGML far outpaces the
understanding of SGML, and that the lack of an accurate,
non-technical explanation remains a major impediment to its
wide-scale adoption, Van Nostrand Reinhold has contracted to
publish a manager's guide to SGML. The book is in progress and
scheduled for publication in the fall of 1994. This book is the
first in a series of books on SGML by VNR and will be followed by
books on DTD writing and other technical subjects.
STC News
The Society for Technical Communication devoted special sections in
two consecutive issues of the quarterly journal "Technical
Communication" to a series of eight articles on SGML from a
beginners' tutorial to case studies to an overview of tools.
More Milestones
The SGML Handbook just reached a milestone 3000 copies sold and is
back to press for its third printing. Martin Bryan's Author's
Guide to SGML is back for its sixth trip to the presses with 7500
copies in print. SoftQuad is pleased to anounce that the "SGML
Primer", its thirty-six page introduction to SGML, is now in its
sixth printing with 3400 copies distributed to date.
The Compleat SGML
Exoterica released "The Compleat SGML" in August, 1993. This
hypertext for Microsoft Windows links the SGML standard with 2348
SGML test documents. The SGML documents are created in accordance
with ANSI's Conformance Testing for SGML Systems standard and serve
to provide detailed illustration of the points being made in the
standard. It also includes annotations that clarify some of the
more esoteric areas of the standard. In all, the hypertext links
numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Exoterica will also release
"The SGML Conformace Test Suite" in January. The SCTS provides the
test documents from "The Compleat SGML" in extractable form with a
database extraction tool. Both the National Computing Center in
England and the National Institute for Standards and Technology
have expressed interest in using the Exoterica Conformance Test
Suite for SGML testing.
Kimber on HyQ
Eliot Kimber has written a reference guide to the all-purpose "HyQ"
SGML query language that forms part of the HyTime international
standard. This publication is available free via anonymous FTP
from either of the two SIGhyper FTP sites (at the University of
Oslo in Norway and at Florida State University in Tallahassee).
5. Government and Corporate Initiatives
Library of Congress
The American Memory Project of the Library of Congress is using
SGML to create a text base of historical materials on subjects such
as Women's Suffrage, the history of American Theatre, and
abolitionism in the US.
University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press is implementing systems for translation
to SGML, on-line editing in SGML, and output to typesetting and for
electronic journals. The first implementation will be for the
Astrophysical Journal.
IBM
The Information Development group within IBM is developing an
internal SGML-conforming system to support the creation,
management, and production of all IBM product documentation for all
media types and delivery methods, using a single, comprehensive
SGML application called IBMIDDOC.
OCLC and Information Dimensions Inc.
OCLC and its subsidiary, Information Dimensions, Inc., (IDI) have
been selected to develop an electronic publishing system for ACM
(the Association for Computing Machinery). The OCLC/IDI in-house
electronic publishing system will integrate the various ACM
publishing functions into a unified, automated system that will
encompass the writing, editing, composition, production, archiving,
and, eventually, distribution of documents and publications. ACM
publishes an estimated 40,000 pages per year, including books,
journals, conference proceedings, and internal publications.
British National Corpus
British National Corpus, a UK government funded academic/industrial
consortium is developing a 100 million word corpus of modem English
for use in lexicography and linguistic research. Due for
completition in April 1994, this corpus is marked up in SGML,
including part of speech codes and will be freely available for
research purposes, together with a high performance SGML-aware
browser/indexer developed for the project.
Springer Verlag
Springer Verlag is currently processing more than 50 journals using
SGML. In 1994 the number of journals will be expanded to 150.
Brockhaus
Brockhaus, the German Encyclopaedia and dictionary publisher,
recently went into production with an SGML-based editorial sysem.
US Government Printing Office
Document analysis is in progress to place the Federal Register
on-line as the GPO continues to publish on paper. GPO's
typesetting programs will be made to recognize SGML codes as well
as its own set of codes that are strictly procedural. The existing
DTD for the Congressional Record on CD-ROM is now being used to
create a database for daily retrieval on bulletin board as well as
the printed document. CD-ROM may follow later.
Uniscope
Uniscope has developed the Japanese Academic DTD for publishing
Japanese Academic Information on-line as a full-text database of
journals.
US Patent and Trademark Office
The US Patent and Trademark Office (of the Department of Commerce),
in cooperation with its Trilateral Partners (European Patent Office
and Japanese Patent Office) in creating a new, proposed revision of
World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) Standard 32, specifying a
list of tags and providing a DTD and instructions for the use of
those tags in electronic exchange of SGML-coded patent and
trademark data. The Trilateral partners are also expecting final
delivery early in 1994 of jointly developed SGML-based CD-ROM
authoring, retrieval, display, and printing software for mixed-mode
(text and images, on-the-fly page construction) patent and
trademark data. The The US Patent and Trademark Office is planning
the conversion of its internal systems for electronic application,
document markup, on-line database, document printing, CD-ROM
production, and dissemination systems to SGML-based text and image
storage.
European Patent Office
The European Patent Office scans, OCRs, tags, and publishes over a
million pages of patent applications a year.
6. Miscellaneous
As a demonstration of the power of information structures to
organize the brain, this year's Miscellaneous section is broken
down into three sub-sections:
A) Miscellaneous Vendors
Although we're not doing a section of vendor announcements this
year -- This area had a separate slot at the SGML '93 Conference --
several major players in the non-SGML world made announcements that
have an impact on the SGML world. These are Adobe, Lotus, and
Microsoft.
Adobe and Avalanche
Adobe has announced a technology licensing agreement with Avalanche
for Avalanche to write code that will ship in an Adobe publishing
product. The software will support the importation of SGML and
other application file formats into structured Acrobat PDF
(Portable Document Format) files. Acrobat will use the document
structure for full text retrieval and the generation of hypertext
links based on the structure. A further goal is to be able to
extract an SGML file from the structured PDF file that is
equivalent to the original SGML file.
Lotus
Lotus Development Corporation indicated at the Seybold conference
two months ago that it is "committed to providing an integrated
SGML solution for a future release of AmiPro".
Microsoft
Late in October everybody's favorite multi-national software
conglomerate posted a long document to Compuserve entitled
"Microsoft Word and the SGML Standard" and announcing a product
called "SGML Author", an add-on to Word comprising a converter
(which is end-user focused) and a separate mapping application
geared to a systems person. The product is planned for commercial
availability in the first half of 1994.
B) Miscellaneous Projects
University of California at Los Angeles
InfoUCLA, UCLA's campus-wide information system, has adopted SGML
to meet the diverse information needs of its community. Everything
from the schedule of classes, campus calendar, and grant
opportunities to press releases and policies are being converted to
SGML for electronic publication to multiple distribution platforms
including the World Wide Web and ICADD. In their words, "InfoUCLA
is using SGML to support local campus diversity through
international standards."
IEEE
The IEEE is completing a suite of DTDs for IEEE standards and
moving into a demo phase. The IEEE will be becoming an Internet
site. It is now putting up anonymous FTP and is debating (as so
many people are) how to charge for publishing electronically.
Medieval SGML
Medieval court protocols for the city of Stockholm are being
marked-up in SGML. These historical documents will then be
available for the benefit of historians, researches and dessimated
electronically in museums using SGML DARC.
Oxford Text Archive
The Oxford Text Archive reports that its conversion of standards
literary works to TEI-conformant SGML is continuing. About 100
titles now are available including complete novels of Trollope,
Twain, Bram Stoker, Jefferson, Henry James, Conan Doyle, etc.
Files are available by anonymous FTP with the admirable policy that
"we don't put anything up for FTP unless it's been marked up in
SGML."
Microsoft
The 1994 Cinemania is now in stores. Microsoft benefited from the
SGML production techniques used in creating the first version in
that they didn't need to create any new hypertext links into the
new data.
American Chemical Society
ACS is now updating their journals DTD with intent to make online
and CD-ROM journal delivery.
World Congress on Expert Systems
In the category of "most far flung SGML contributions", the World
Congress on Expert Systems simultaneously delivered a CD-ROM of its
proceedings and both hard cover and paperback print versions
including 210 submitted papers. All this was produced from
diskettes of text with SGML markup from a total of 35 countries!
University of Norway
The University of Norway in Bergen is converting their collection
of Norwegian songs to SGML, for easy translation into ASCII, HTML,
and LaTex. The database is primarily text but there are chords
included for a lot of songs, and the melodies for some. A
preliminary version of the server has been set up.
Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
The critical text edition of Swedish author August Strindberg's
collected works are being marked-up in SGML.
News from France
Bureau Veritas (Marine Branch), the French ship classification
company, has adopted SGML and began retrofit of their regulations
database to SGML, including an impressive proportion of SGML-coded
math and tables. CD-ROM publishing of this database is expected in
1994, and a DynaText prototype was recently presented. INSEE, the
French National Institute for Economic Statistics and Studies, is
currently exploring SGML technology and expect to apply it to a
large number of their publications. The PSA group (Peugot and
Citroen) are confirming their move towards the generation of SGML
for creation, management and paper-based or electronic publishing
of car maintenance documentation. Electricite de France is
confirming their choice of SGML as the strategic technology to
create and maintain documentation. In the R&D division, a new
project of building a HyTime-based multimedia server was launched.
Several publishers of reference materials are moving to SGML.
Flammarion used SGML to create the Dictionnaire de Geopolitique,
which, because of the use of SGML, will be published on CD-ROM just
after the first printing. In this case, the main incentive for
using SGML for this new project was the expected high annual rate
of changes in this text database ... In the words of Francois
Chahuneau of AIS, "Political geography tends to be redefined quite
often these days!"
The Swedish Defense Materiel Administration (FMV)
FMV is in the process of developing a Base DTD for all technical
information (i.e., text, illustrations, schemas, etc., constituting
the information needed to operate and maintain a materiel system).
The DTD is to apply to any materiel system ranging from tanks,
fighters, to submarines, radios, radars, trucks, etc. The Base DTD
will be modularized, and based on functional content coding. The
goal is to provide SGML-coded text (and references to graphics) in
small modules that can be collected and presented in different ways
for different purposes, on demand.
News from Australia
The Australian Department of Defence has just closed a Request for
Quotation for consultants to develop an Australian variant of
MIL-M-28001 and companions such as OS and FOSI. This version will
describe Administration as well as Technical manuals. Legislation
from State governments of New South Wales, Victoria and South
Australia is in various stages of being made available
electronically. These projects all involve SGML. Australia's
largest SGML project to date, the Australian Tax Office's IRIS
Project, moved into use from prototype earlier this year. The
challenge for the project now is to populate the data base. The
Australian Stock Exchange is piloting the use of SGML in delivering
company data -- a 200mb text database. One of Australia's foremost
Information Research Institutes is due to release an SGML-aware
database in conjunction with a major system integrator in the very
near future. The Commonwealth Attorney General is redeveloping
their data base of legislation and case law; the likely technology
for this will be SGML.
News from Taiwan
The Research Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC), a
government agency responsible for directing and facilitating the
standardization and computerization of government operations, has
promulgated 25 standard forms for official documents. Earlier this
year RDEC has also designated SGML as a preferred standard for
document interchange. In response, Yaun-Ze Institute of Technology
developed a common tag set, 25 DTDs and some public entities for
RDEC's adoption.
The CJK Document Processing Meeting, an Ad Hoc SWG of WG8,
initiated project SPREAD (Standardizaton Project Regarding
East-Asian Documents) last year. SPREAD consists of 4 multilingual
working projects on DTD, linguistics, fonts and hypermedia. Taiwan
is responsible for those on DTD and linguistics. Final reports are
due in May 1994.
Yuan-Ze Institute of Technology initiated a joint project with IBM,
Naggum Software and TechnoTeacher to develop an ObjectSGML/HyTime
Parser and Portable Object-oriented Entity Manager (POEM) for
public use free of charge. (See top of this article.)
The SGML Consortium of 11 vendors in Taiwan and led by Yaun-Ze
Institute of Technology has released a product called the
SGML-document Preparation and Applications Development Environment
(SPADE), which consists of SGML kernel API, DTD-directed editor,
DTD and SGML validators, formatter and other utilities, all with
Chinese language capabilities. Future efforts of the consortium
will be in the development of market-driven SGML applications.
C) Miscellaneous Miscellaneous
ACM Hypertext Conference
In the category of creeping SGMLishness, the ACM's Hypertext
Conference was practically overrun last month in Seattle with 5 out
of its 24 courses related to SGML. Even a course on IETMs and the
Content Data Model had 40 people in it.
Largest SGML Document
David Peterson reports that, as far as he knows, the world's
largest SGML document remains the US Defense Logistics Agency's
Internal Catalog of Medical Supplies. Published quarterly, the
catalog includes more than 3 gigabytes of SGML text -- plus
graphics!
O'Reilly & Associates and Harvard University
A new mail list called etext@ora.com has been established to
address the problem of making published books available to the
blind in electronic form. O'Reilly & Associates and Harvard
University met to gain practical experience in addressing these
issues by providing digital documentation to Harvard students and
staff. Outside experts are involved by invitation, and the scope
will be expanded to address peripheral and broader issues as
initial problems are solved. Lar Kaufman reports, "We are
carefully limiting our scope to ensure that we cope with immediate
issues before expanding oour range of activities and broadening
participation."
Cal Poly University, California
Future publishing managers are now learning about SGML, thanks to
industry support to Cal Poly University at San Luis Obispo. The
Graphic Communications Department is one of the largest printing
management degree programs in the country. Brian Travis -- a
graduate of the program -- has spearheaded this effort, with
support from Exoterica, SoftQuad, Information Architects, and the
GCA. Brian has developed a hands-on laboratory project which gives
these future managers direct experience working with SGML and SGML
tools.
First Ever SGML Summer Holiday
The first French SGML Summer School was organized by BL/AIS, AFNOR
and ADHARA in Vittel for a week at the end of June. Thirty-five
participants received an intensive mix of theoretical and practical
training.
Data Conversion Laboratory
Data Conversion Laboratory tells us that it this year converted its
100 billionth character. SGML constitutes 80% of DCL's current
business.
Joan Smith
Joan Smith, often referred to as the godmother of SGML, has retired
this year. Joan founded and led the SGML Users' Group until 1990.
She also founded and led the CALS in Europe Special Interest Group.
Her latest book, "SGML and Related Standards", is published in the
UK by Ellis Horwood and distributed in North America by Simon &
Shuster (and the GCA). We wish Joan a long and leisurely
retirement and express our thanks to her for all her help and
efforts throughout the years.
USENET
As of early November, the estimated readership of comp.text.sgml
newsgroup was 36,000 people, up 4,000 from October. 78% of the
USENET community receives the newsgroup on their system, and can
read it if they want to. In October, 178 messages comprising 495K
were posted to the newsgroup. Only 2% of the articles are
crossposted to other newsgroups which indicates a continued and
specific need for the newsgroup, although only 1% of the total
USENET readership reads it. No one has yet determined whether you
can trust newsgroup readership statistics, but whatever they mean,
comp.text.sgml is showing steady growth.
SGML Multi-media from IBM and Playboy!
In the realm of non context-sensitive projects, all the Playboy
Magazine issues from 1962-92 are available on a CD-ROM produced by
IBM Multi-media Lab for release soon and "unveiled" yesterday at
the OmniMark User Group meeting. Some of the interviews include
animation and audio. I think it's fair to say that no one would
have predicted Playboy Magazine moving to SGML.
And on that unusual note, we conclude this year's broadcast. Now the
weather.
--
Yuri Rubinsky +1 416 239-4801
Chairman, SGML '93 (800) 387-2777 (from US only)
President, SoftQuad Inc. uucp: {uunet,utzoo}!sq!yuri
Suite 810 56 Aberfoyle Crescent Internet: yuri@sq.com
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M8X 2W4 Fax: +1 416 239-7105
