Review 39 How Practical is Practical SGML ? Robert J. Glushko, Passage Systems, Inc. Five years ago the first edition of Eric van Herwijnen's Practical SGML was for me and many other people a Rosetta Stone that enabled us to understand SGMLsyntax I eagerly looked forward to the second edition because today my business is "practical SGMI2'-- helping organizations use SGMLas a means for managing information in non-proprietary ways so that the same content can be delivered in multiple formats or channels, such as CD-ROM, the World Wide Web, print, or Braille. But there is a paradox to my review - the second edition is significantlybetter than the first in many respects, but feels much less practical than the first edition did. The world has changed more dramatically than the author's perspective on SGMLhas, and Practical SGML,with its strong focus on SGMLsyntax, no longer is the best book to start with for someone new to SGML. An Introduction to SGML SGML,the Standard Generalized Markup Language, is an international standard (ISO 8879) that defines a syntax for the character representation of structured information, in contrast to the proprietary binary formats of word processors. An SGML document contains the textual
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