Re: Separation of presentation and structure

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Mon, 7 Aug 95 00:24:35 EDT

>This is assuming that people (a) are rational, and (b) take a long term
>view. I am not convinced that either is true in any widespread sense.

Hah! Very well said!

>SGML based publishing tools have had no success on the mass market,
>and SGML is hardly new technology.

It depends on your definition of publishing. For long-lived data to be
viewd online, SGML is becoming a very hot technology. For print, SGML
is generally converted to something else (and the fact that you can
do this is a selling point).

>I think, as I've said before, that we are seeing the WWW split into two
>general classes of content: high-volume SGML-based content (IBM's web site
>is a great example), and low-volume visual content (most small WWW sites and
>personal WWW pages).

The main point is that for home pages, and small scale publishing,
HTML will reign, but when sites wish to make large volumes of data
available, SGML, or something like it, will rule. There *will* be a
change in the focus away from HTML. SGML will be in there, as will
other formats. It's a big net, and by building the infrastructure, we
can do whatever we want. I *like* structured markup, but I'm not like
some that think it's all we'll ever need, though I might come across
that way.

I have managed a largish (in terms of data size) WWW site (before the
explosion), and it was a nightmare. Compared to that, DynaWeb makes
publishing large amounts of data trivial: that was
one of the key design focuses. The reason why it is so easy can be
attributed soley to structured markup, well applied.

Of course, we also have SGML browsers becoming available. That is
significant as well.