Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 22:58:24 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Sean Kelly <kelly@fsl.noaa.gov> Cc: chuckr@Glue.umd.edu, FreeBSD-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Linuxdoc Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960604224345.422Z-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199606050233.CAA11953@gatekeeper.fsl.noaa.gov>
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On Tue, 4 Jun 1996, Sean Kelly wrote:
> While I like being able to focus entirely on substance instead of on
> format with tools like TeX, *roff, and even SGML, the best document
> production package I ever used was Interleaf. Sure, it was WYSIWYG,
^^^^^^^^^
...Who was on the SGML bandwagon quite some time ago.
> But, it seems like they're going out of business---if they haven't
> already.
Rumor has it that the spelling checker in Frame will suggest
"Framemaker" if it finds the word "Interleaf" in your document...
> And of those, some kind of SGML-based tool still seems like a good
> choice if it at least means that most the groffers and the TeXies will
The holy grail of SGML is to decouple documents from the tools.
This is not just desirable, it is a basic requirement for
document longevity and portability. SGML standardizes the
parsing of data so that any parser on any platform can read any
document and make its data easily available to your application.
What you DO with it is up to you; most likely you will use some
proprietary tool that works well at the time, for the task. When
the comany that made that nifty proprietary tool gets put out of
business by Mr. Gates, it won't take the data with it if it used
SGML. I come from a library background where we *expect*
materials to be just as accessible in 150 years as they are
today. With digital data locked up in proprietary formats
intimately tied to the software that created them, and the
computer architecture on which that software ran, we already have
data less than a decade old that is lost.
SGML is a Good Thing, but we are still climbing the learning
curve and the tools are pretty green. Things are getting better
though. Rumor has it that the next release of WordPerfect will
have their SGML extensions (which are actually pretty good) as
standard equipment. Not that it will affect us directly, as the
number of applications increase, so do the benefits of using
SGML.
-john
== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================
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