Re: How to start sgml?
Thomas Guettler <guettli@interface-business.de> writes:
TG> On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 01:36:45PM +0100, Kai Weber wrote:
KW> I just installed the task-sgml package for learning and using sgml. But
KW> where do I start? There is no hint from where I should start learning
KW> the sgml syntax and so on.
TG>
TG> Start learning XML, SGML is old and too complex. XML is a standard of
TG> the w3c (www.w3c.org)
TeX is also "old and complex", but this doesn't stop lots of people
from using it for all sorts of things. For that matter, so is the X
Window System. Don't belittle stable, standardized software.
One commonly used SGML DTD is the W3C's HyperText Markup Language,
HTML. A very rough description of SGML syntax is "things that look
sort of like HTML but with different things inside the angle
brackets".
There are a decent number of things you can do with SGML and the
associated tools. I'd recommend looking at DocBook; the O'Reilly book
is pretty good here, and gives a decent amount of insight into SGML in
general. For something entirely and completely different, you might
poke around at the files in http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/resume/, which
contain my resume in SGML format with a homegrown DTD and DSSSL style
sheet.
Quick summary of things you can do, given an SGML document foo.sgml
with an associated DSSSL style sheet foo.dsl:
SGML->TeX: jade -t tex foo.sgml
TeX->DVI: jadetex foo
TeX->PDF: pdfjadetex foo
SGML->RTF: jade -t rtf foo.sgml
SGML to HTML is possible, too, but it generally requires a different
style sheet.
--
David Maze dmaze@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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