SGML Today

New tools pave the way for sgml, slowly but surely emerging as the unequivocal standard for document interchange.

“Interleaf is committing its resources to solving a fundamental dilemma faced by every major organization in the global drive towards harmonization, unification, and internalization, that of choosing between either a single vendor or a data format to ensure uniformity,” declared Interleaf president Mark Ruport at his company’s recent European press conference held in Amsterdam. “We believe the only acceptable choice is standardizing on a data format. That data format is SGML.”
    “In the course of designing the 707 aircraft, Boeing went through seven proprietary publishing environments with seven proprietary document formats,” related Ruport. He went on to say that organizations are finding that reusing data can be an expensive problem. Given the current costs of information systems, converting data from one system to another can be more costly than the system itself. He warned of the hazards of obsolete data, data which is held hostage by an application. “SGML,” he concludes, “is the key to separating the content of information from its storage and display form.”
    On June 4, Interleaf, a leading supplier of technical document publishing systems (1991 revenues: us$100 million), made the major announcement that SGML will henceforth form the basis of the company’s open document systems. Outlining his company’s plans, Ruport said, “our strategy is quite simple: we want to make SGML easy to install and easy to use in real-world, enterprise-wide publishing environments. To implement this strategy, we’re announcing new products, a new architecture for our technology, new services, and new strategic alliances with other vendors.”
    At the core of the company’s new strategy is Interleaf 5 <SGML>, an extended version of Interleaf’s flagship product. It offers a fully wysiwyg environment which provides users with a comfortable buffer against the inherent user-unfriendliness of SGML. Interleaf 5 <SGML> steers authors through the process of creating and validating documents which meet the structural requirements of SGML Document Type Definitions (DTD). SGML does not explicitly define formatting attributes, but Interleaf works around this by allowing the creation of ancillary stylesheet files which define the formatting associated with a given tag.
    According to Frank Gilbane, an independent consultant who was an advisor to the us Goverment’s cals initiative and an active participant in the development of iso standards for information exchange, “use of SGML is skyrocketing.” Why? “Because it is seen as a way of controlling the costs of managing information. As equipment becomes more complex, its documentation becomes correspondingly more expensive. As a result, the cost of the final product rises. SGML is a way of controlling these costs,” explains Gilbane.

DTD deprivation
Gilbane says two major barriers have hindered the acceptance of SGML: the limited availability of SGML editors and the lack of DTDs for specific applications. With its product announcements and alliances with companies such as SoftQuad, the Canadian developer of Author/Editor, an SGML editor for the Mac and Windows, Interleaf is clearly addressing the first problem. Concerning the second, the company is also offering “document engineering services” to help its customers design and optimize DTDs and make the move to SGML. Interleaf will also be working together with Rank Xerox (uk) to provide “large-scale SGML solutions.”

(See  sidebar which appeared with this article)

Interleaf, Inc. Prospect Place, 9 Hillside Ave., Waltham, MA 02154, USA Tel +1 617 290 0710

Interleaf Benelux Bijster 20, 4817 HX Breda, The Netherlands Tel +31 76 205085, Fax +31 76 205095