| Personally, I would like to be able to "type" parts of my documents. A
| trivial example would be:
|
| <TYPE name="location/city">Hope</TYPE>
If you extended this idea so that you could define your own tags and
attribute names in a manner completely tailored to the needs of your
application, you would have full SGML.
In the software industry, for example, we have defined an SGML tag
language called DocBook in which all of the elements and attributes
are optimized for tagging and searching on software manuals. If you
go to http://www.novell.com and click on the "Manuals" button you can
connect to a Web server that has about 300 technical manuals marked up
in DocBook. In that space, you can retrieve text based on whether
it's tagged <procedure> or <function> or <msg> or any of dozens of
other markup constructs designed specifically for software
documentation.
The clean way to solve your problem is to define a DTD with a CITY tag
in it, so that you could just say
<CITY>Hope</CITY>
Of course, HTML browsers are not up to coping with generalized markup
yet, so you would have two choices for delivering documents that you
have tagged this way: either allow the user to search your database
for <CITY> tags and then convert to HTML for download, which is what
we do at the moment on www.novell.com, or use the emerging SGML
browsers like Panorama that can handle generalized markup directly.
Jon
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Jon Bosak, Novell Corporate Publishing Services jb@novell.com
2180 Fortune Drive, San Jose, CA 95131 Fax: 408 577 5020
A sponsor of the Davenport Group (ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/davenport/)
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The Library is a sphere whose consummate center is any hexagon, and
whose circumference is inaccessible. -- Jorge Luis Borges
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