SGML & the TW

[Gerry Bourguignon <ad767 -at- FREENET -dot- CARLETON -dot- CA>]

First, I'd like to join Anatole Wilson in thanking Liora Alschuler for her
long and comprehensive posting on SGML.

As for those who thought I may have quoted van Herwijnen out of context,
that may very well be the case.  At any rate, it got you to respond.  In
fact, this list has been looking more like the comp.text.sgml newsgroup
lately, only much more interesting.

It is perhaps only fair to point out that van Herwijnen is no doubt a
dedicated supporter of the SGML standard and was, in fact, describing the
problems associated with specific markup as well as the "disturbing
phenomenon" he calls "fontitis" (on page 6 - for those who have a copy of
his book).

In the preface, van Herwijnen sympathizes with authors (and writers) by
saying "It is hard to explain to an author that text, which exists on a
computer, needs to be retyped in a different format."  This, of course,
being one of the problems of electronic publishing that SGML can solve.

BTW, for those who are interested, the second edition of "Practical SGML"
has a publication date of April 30, 1994 and a 20% discount on pre-
publication orders is being offered.  There are, apparently, several
improvements over the first edition including complete reorganization of
the material, ideas on how to stay current with information on SGML, and
overviews of other ISO text processing standards such as DSSSL, HyTime,
SDIF, etc.

The table of contents may be found on ftp.std.com in /ftp/Kluwer/books as
well as a postscript file containing the first 30 pages of the book.

(this information was posted to the comp.text.sgml newsgroup recently).


--
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|   Gerry Bourguignon            "I watched the ripples change their     |
|   ad767 -at- freenet -dot- carleton -dot- ca     size, but never leave the stream of    |
|   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA       warm impermanence..."  (David Bowie)   |