NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/comp/text/sgml/1180

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-15 | 3.1 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!ralvm13.VNET.IBM.COM
From: [e-mail]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 08:28:46 EST
Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml
Subject: Re: short introduction needed.  relation to TeX?
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not those of IBM
News-Software: UReply 3.0
References: <ucc02aa.721738960@sun3>
Lines: 54

In <ucc02aa.721738960@sun3> Pilch writes:

>A friend told me, that SGML might be even more useful than
>TeX and that it has good development prospects because IBM
>is putting an effort into it...

>...I feel that IBM apparently doesn't want to promote this product
>at all and wonder what this forum is about.
>
>Hartmut PILCH M.A.
>East-Asia ftp-archive administrator at ftp.lrz-muenchen.de
>(Unfortunatly /pub/ostasien/sw/SGML/... is barren at the moment)

SGML is not a program or a product, but an international standard.
Many companies provide SGML-based products, of which IBM is only
one.  IBM is very much committed to the use of SGML for many
aspects of its own business, including the use of SGML languages
and processors for producing its product documentation and the use
of HyTime systems for delivery of hypertext and hypermedia.
At the recent SGML '92 conference there was a wide range of very
mature products and systems for working with SGML.  As a way to
solve some serious information management problems, IBM sees SGML
as key to its future documentation production and management
systems.

SGML is a data structuring language optimized for the representation
of text.  Thus it has direct application to the problem of creating
and maintaining translated documents.  TeX, by contrast, is
a programming language for formatting.  It can be used for data
structuring, but it lacks some of the attributes of SGML that make
SGML the better choice for data structuring.  TeX is still an
excellent choice for doing formatting of SGML documents and many
vendors can sell you systems that do just that.  If you have
an existing set of TeX macros that describe the structure of
your documents, it is probably an easy task to create an SGML
tag set that expresses that structure and then use a system
like SGMLS, which you can get for free off the Internet, to
create an SGML-to-TeX transform that maps the SGML elements to
the TeX macros you already have.  The advantage is that you can
do things such as use an SGML editor to edit your text with
more visual feedback but complete access to the structure provided
by the SGML markup.  You could also interchange your documents
with others who cannot process TeX.  For example, if I was to
buy your documents in TeX form, I would not be able to integrate
them into IBM's document processing systems, which are not TeX
based, but if you gave me SGML, I can quickly integrate them
because it is easy to integrate any SGML tag set into IBM's
system *because it is easy to write SGML-to-x transforms*.

Eliot Kimber                      Internet:  [e-mail]
Dept E14/B500                     IBMMAIL:   USIB2DK9@IBMMAIL
Network Programs Information Development     Phone: [phone]
IBM Corporation
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709