The Investigation of an implementation of SGML based publishing of an graduate thesis

The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) has been the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) published standard for text interchange for nearly a decade. Since 1986, SGML based publishing has been successfully implemented in many fields, notably those industries with massive and mission-critical publishing operations such as the military, legal, medical, and heavy industries. SGML based publishing differs from the WYSIWYG paradigm of desktop publishing in that an SGML document contains descriptive, structural markup rather than specific formatting markup. Specific markup describes the appearance of a document and is usually a proprietary code which makes the document difficult to re-use or interchange to different systems. The structurally generic markup codes in an SGML document allow the fullest exploitation of the information. An SGML document exhibits more re-usability than a document created and stored in a proprietary formatting code. In many cases, workflow and production are greatly improved by the implementation of SGML based publishing. Historical and anecdotal case studies of many applications clearly delineate the benefits of an SGML based publishing system. And certainly, the boom in Web publishing has spurred interest in enabling a publishing system with multi-output functionality. However, implementation is associated with high costs. The acquisition of new tools and new skills is a costly investment. A careful cost-benefit analysis must determine that the current publishing needs would be satisfied by moving to SGML. Increased productivity is the measure by which SGML is adopted. The purpose of this thesis project is to investigate the relative benefits and requirements of a simple SGML based publishing implementation. The graduate thesis for most of the School of Printing Management and Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology was used as an example. The author has expanded the requirements for the publication process of a graduate thesis with factors which do not exist in reality. The required output has been expanded from mere print output to include publishing on the World Wide Web (WWW) in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and to some proprietary electronic browser such as Folio Views for inclusion in a searchable collection of graduate theses on CD-ROM. A proposed set of tools and methods are discussed in order to clarify the requirements of such an SGML implementation

SGML-based publishing

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The Evolution, current status, and future direction of XML

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is now established as a multifaceted open-ended markup language and continues to increase in popularity. The major players that have shaped its development include the United States government, several key corporate entities, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This paper will examine these influences on XML and will address the emergence, the current status, and the future direction of this language. In addition, it will review best practices and research that have contributed to the continued development and advancement of XML

An Overview of Electronic Publishing and Extensible Markup Language (XML)

Many knowledge-based organizations are expanding their publishing efforts to include electronic publishing. This article gives evidence of this move and discusses the factors that have been instrumental in promoting electronic publishing. The importance of information stucture and adherence to open standards are emphasized as critical components of digital document management systems. The development and use of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) are discussed along with their strengths and weaknesses as tools of electronic publishing. An emerging alternative, Extensible Markup Language (XML), is described as having features that may reduce some of the impediments to producing and managing documents digitally

Extensible Markup Language: An Enterprise Integration Web Delivery System

This study investigates XML technology as a standard format for data transfer on the Web. It describes several compelling reasons why XML is a particularly useful technology for representing structured systems management information. XML is a markup language used for data structure in a textual form. A specific goal of XML is to keep most of the descriptive power of SGML, while removing as much of the complexity as possible. XML is similar in concept to HTML, but whereas HTML is used to convey graphic information about a document, XML is used to represent structured data in a document. It is no wonder, global businesses are rushing to implement XML technology

Backus-Naur Form Based Script Definition Language for Multimedia Presentation Document

The integration of the text, graphic, audio, video and animation on the desktop promises to fundamentally challenge the old models of the printed document as the basis for information exchange. A multimedia document is a specification activity that can be used to coordinate the presentation runtime of the media objects. Several language that support the multimedia document exist today, for example HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Interaction Language). HTML is an SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) based standard document model that defines syntax to enrich text pages with structural and layout information. The dynamic modification to structure, layout and content of an HTML document are allowed using a scripting language which is known as DHTML (Dynamic HyperText Markup Language). SMIL is the web format for multimedia document, which is based on XML (extensible Markup Language). Driven by the use of the text markup tags in the multimedia document, the Script Definition Language or simply SDL is developed. The SDL is a definition language for multimedia document that provides a specification to include mulltimedia elements, such as text, image, animation, audio, and video. The structure of the SDL- is described using the Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF). In the EBNF, one way to determine the semantic of the language is achieved by derivation. The standard method to derive the semantic of the language in EBNF is using a parse tree. The multimedia document proposed is called the script document. There is a browser called the Script Multimedia Presentation (SMP) system, which is developed to generate the presentation output. The browser system scans the input file and produces error messages if it does not fulfill the specification. Each of the input documents derives a parse tree to show that the syntax follows the specification. Only the valid input document derives a valid parse tree and produces output. This can be concluded that the input document should strictly follow the SDL specification in order to generate the multimedia presentation

Design issues in the production of hyper‐books and visual‐books

This paper describes an ongoing research project in the area of electronic books. After a brief overview of the state of the art in this field, two new forms of electronic book are presented: hyper‐books and visual‐books. A flexible environment allows them to be produced in a semi‐automatic way starting from different sources: electronic texts (as input for hyper‐books) and paper books (as input for visual‐books). The translation process is driven by the philosophy of preserving the book metaphor in order to guarantee that electronic information is presented in a familiar way. Another important feature of our research is that hyper‐books and visual‐books are conceived not as isolated objects but as entities within an electronic library, which inherits most of the features of a paper‐based library but introduces a number of new properties resulting from its non‐physical nature

On the Lossless Transformation of Single-File, Multi-Layer Annotations into Multi-Rooted Trees

The Generalised Architecture for Sustainability (GENAU) provides a framework for the transformation of single-file, multi-layer annotations into multi-rooted trees. By employing constraints expressed in XCONCUR-CL, this procedure can be performed lossless, i.e., without losing information, especially with regard to the nesting of elements that belong to multiple annotation layers. This article describes how different types of linguistic corpora can be transformed using specialised tools, and how constraint rules can be applied to the resulting multi-rooted trees to add an additional level of validation