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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.apps
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!sunic!aun.uninett.no!nuug!ifi.uio.no!enag
- From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
- Reply-To: Erik Naggum <enag@ifi.uio.no>
- Message-ID: <19930112.001@erik.naggum.no>
- Date: 12 Jan 1993 17:57:55 +0100
- References: <1993Jan4.200343.20281@texhrc.uucp> <ul4ckqk@zuni.esd.sgi.com> <1993Jan10.215534.7994@bitrot.in-berlin.de>
- Subject: Re: Insight....adding your own documents
- Lines: 36
-
- [Thomas Driemeyer]
- :
- | The format of the SGML documents should be published and accessible
- | though, so that everyone can add books without having to use external
- | service bureaus. If the format is closed, Insight might suffer the same
- | fate as the license server.
-
- I don't know anything useful about Insight, and was alerted to this
- message, but at least I know about SGML.
-
- SGML is an International Standard (ISO 8879), and has been since 1986, and
- has been one of ISO's best selling standards. So "the format of the SGML
- documents" is at least partially easily available. The standard, however,
- is not the whole story. An SGML document conforms to a document type
- definition (DTD), and it's really the DTD that defines the names of the
- elements (information containers) in the document and their meaning, since
- SGML does not specify processing in any way. The language is "only" a
- means to represent a structure of nested information containers as a string
- of characters (file, if you want); the rest is up to an application of SGML
- to a specific kind of structure. The good news is that the DTD must be
- available with all SGML documents conforming to them, so somewhere on the
- system, there should be a concise description of each element, and how they
- interrelate, usually in the form of the SGML "document type declaration":
- look for the string "<!DOCTYPE" and see what it references.
-
- For more information, see comp.text.sgml, or mail me.
-
- Hope this helps.
-
- Best regards,
- </Erik>
- --
- Erik Naggum ISO 8879 SGML +47 295 0313
- Oslo, Norway ISO 10744 HyTime
- <erik@naggum.no> ISO 9899 C Memento, terrigena
- <SGML@ifi.uio.no> ISO 10646 UCS Memento, vita brevis
-