Standard Generalized Markup Language

Standard Generalized Markup Language (standardized language of generalized beaconing - SGML) is a language of description to beacons, of standard ISO (ISO 8879:1986).

History

In 1979, Charles Goldfarb, who is then project manager at IBM, made launch by this company a descriptive language, or Generalized Markup Language (Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie), intended to encapsulate the old language Script too physically related to the technical possibilities of the printers. The unit is marketed under the name of DCF ( Document Composition Facility ). A non-standard file named the profiles , as well as a library of macros, indicate how the marks will be interpreted.

Goldfarb, that this language returns quickly celebrates, then leaves this company to develop a successor of GML called SGML ( Standard Generalized Markup Language ), published in 1986 like Norme ISO (ISO 8879:1986).

The European Communities join this innovative development as of 1984 and then adopt the SGML like standard for their very many official publications, within the framework of project FORMEX (Formalized Exchange off Electronic Publications). They develop also Mark-It, the first Parser SGML which does not suffer from restrictions compared to the most advanced specifications a SGML.

One of the basic principles on which the SGML rests is complete separation between the logical structure of a document (titles, chapters, paragraphs, illustrations,…), which is identified by beacons inserted in the document itself, of its page layout, which depends on the support of presentation (delivers, newspaper, screen, graph even) and which is defined apart from the document in one or more style sheets (police force, style, size and color of the characters, alignment and paragraph spacing,…).

SGML rationalizes the documentary systems of IBM. It facilitated much in France the work of the airframe manufacturers, Airbus thus taking again the documentation of SNECMA at once displayable under its own standards, and recovered in their turn by his own customers who posted them with their standards; or by arsenals easily delivering to their customers (marine Air force, and Army, and sometimes armed foreign) of the documentations to these standards personalized without overcost any.

This language becomes in particular a standard of representation to the CERN, which needs to unify in a rigorous way the presentation of the documents its teams but without to decentralize them in their imposing technical details of typography. INRIA will carry out one of first editors SGML, called Grif, with an interface close to that of Word.

HTML, created by Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web, is an application of SGML.

Various information

a document SGML must contain a reference to a DTD.
XML, standard being used to describe structured documents, was created starting from SGML. It is acted in fact of a simplified version of SGML (fixed “profile” of the standard, DTD optional, particular syntax for the empty elements) and more adapted to the Web (native support of various international codings).

There exists an application of SGML called HyTime which makes it possible to describe bonds between documents SGML.
There exists moreover a language of writing of style sheets for documents SGML called DSSSL.

An example of document SGML

he wanted to be Chateaubriand or rien.

See too

Internal bonds

External bonds

Formex - Formalized Exchange off Electronic Publications
Web Services Definitions - SGML

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