Welcome to SGML on the Web

A Personal Note from those of us working on these pages: What with travel to conferences and working on getting SoftQuad Panorama out the door, the links from this page have languished for a couple of weeks. Please excuse our embarrassing delay in fixing this. This version fixes references to the Primer, the glossary and to the demo/tutorial files. Some pages may contain parsing errors. Not to worry. Simply click on "Continue" to view the SGML pages. Later we may try to write an editorial on the subject of how impressive it is that daily newspapers can appear every day, while pages on the Web often go unattended for weeks and months. (On the other hand, maybe that sentence says it all. Save us the trouble of writing the editorial.)

This page acts as a Home Page for SGML on the Web, including:

  • pointers to SGML resources and events,
  • information about new or changed sites offering SGML documents on the World Wide Web, updated weekly.
  • notes on when and how to put full SGML online
  • a glossary of very basic SGML terms,
  • connections to tutorials and demos, and
    •

    Administrative Matters

  • To Submit an Entry to SGML on the Web, send mail to websgml@sq.com with New SGML on the Web in the Subject line, and we'll mail you a short form to complete.
  • About the NCSA/SoftQuad SGML on the Web Page


    • To Submit Reader Comments. We appreciate any comments about the usefulness of these listings -- please send them to websgml-comments@sq.com. These comments may be published as part of the SGML on the Web Page.

    What Is This All About?

    You may be asking yourself: "This SGML stuff seems very important and very useful. Why haven't I heard about it before?" That's a fair question.

    Truth be told, SGML is a well-guarded secret; it is an official International Standard (ISO/IEC 8879:1986) for the electronic interchange of information that has been adopted by the European Community, the governments of the US and Canada, the aerospace, automotive, semiconductor, defense and other industries. But somehow, despite all this acceptance, it remains one of the quietest revolutions around. Granted, it used to have a reputation as being somewhat complicated, but the success of HTML -- which is in fact a simple application of SGML -- shows that anyone can play.

    SGML Available on the Web Today

    Guide to Magellan Image Interpretation

    Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA), Pasadena, California, USA

    This guide to interpreting Venus image data collected by the Magellan spacecraft is available here as the first JPL-produced SGML document.

    http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/mgddf/guidesgml.html

    Internet Directory of Literacy and Adult Education Resource

    Sponsored by Thomas W. Eland (tweland@a1.stthomas.edu), Coordinator of the Minnesota/South Dakota Regional Adult Literacy Resource Center, University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, MN (Information Content) and SAGRELTO Enterprises, Inc., Durham, NC (SGML/HTML Web conversion).

    The first SGML/HTML edition of this Directory contains information about 134 literacy and adult education resources on the Internet, collected by Mr. Eland to aid in his work with adult literacy.

    http://www.cybernetics.net/users/sagrelto/elands/home.sgm

    Other Pages by Sagrelto

    Middle Atlantic Star Party

    NC Literacy Resource Center

    SAGRELTO's Web Home - SGML

    Excerpts from Bailey's 1736 English Dictionary

    A collection of a few hundred excerpts from the 1736 edition ofNathan Bailey's English Dictionary, as prepared by Liam Quin,lee@sq.com.

    http://www.oclc.org:5046/oclc/research/panorama/contrib/liamquin/baileys/index.html

    University of Illinois Digital Library Homepage

    This small sample from the UIUC DLI testbed is illustrative of the SGML texts that make up the testbed collection. Permission to make the items listed below available for viewing by users of the WWW at large has been granted provisionally by the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Please keep in mind that these materials are copyrighted. Observe copyright restrictions.

    http://morrigan.grainger.uiuc.edu/~ieee_cs/default.htm

    Sample Chapters from DNS and BIND

    Here are sample chapters from the O'Reilly & Associates bookDNS and BIND, by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu.

    DNS and BIND contains all you need to know about the Internet'sDomain Name System (DNS) and the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND),its UNIX implementation. The Domain Name System is the Internet's `phonebook'; it's a database that tracks important information (in particular,names and addresses) for every computer on the Internet.

    http://www.oclc.org:5046/oclc/research/panorama/contrib/oreilly/allen/

    The Works of William Shakespeare

    The latest thing in poetry and drama, contributed by Jon Bosak of Novell.

    http://www.oclc.org:5046/oclc/research/panorama/contrib/Shakespeare/index.html

    The Text Encoding Initiative

    The Text Encoding Initiative's P3 fascicle, containing guidelines for marking up literature in SGML; also the new, smaller TEI Lite.

    http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/p3/

    There are loads of files under ftp://ota.ox.ac.uk/pub/ota/public which are currently in an early version of TEI Lite but will soon be upgraded to use new improved SHINING LITE (and joined by many, many, others). They include poetry, prose, drama and all sorts.

    The main entry point to the Oxford Text Archive itself is http://ota.ox.ac.uk/~archive/ota.html.

    There is a lot of information on the British National Corpus at http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc, including a link to the BNC Reference Manual.

    A report on the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service marked up in TEI Lite is at ftp://ota.ox.ac.uk/AHD.

    Modern English Collection

    University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    A collection of more than 300 Modern English texts is accessible through both a search and browse interface, all made possible through the use of SGML and Open Text's PAT search engine. The texts are primarily significant literary resources collected from around the Internet and from scholars who brought the works into machine-readable form. All texts are searchable as a collection or in subsets; each textmay be extracted from the collection as an SGML document. Texts are encoded using the TEI "pocket" DTD (sometimes called the TEI LiteDTD), available at ftp://ftp-tei.uic.edu/pub/tei/lite/lite14.dtd.This collection will continue to grow as resources are created or located and encoded.

    http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/pd-modeng/

    Middle English Collection

    University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    A collection of twenty-eight Middle English texts is accessible through both a search and browse interface, all made possible through the useof SGML and Open Text's PAT search engine.

    http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/ME.html

    Alice Freeman Palmer: Evolution of a New Woman

    University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    This book, authored by the late Ruth Bordin and published by the University of Michigan Press in 1993, is now available in SGML. A significant exerpt is available in SGML from the University of Michigan Press's WWW server. This book has been validated against theISO Book (ISO 12083) DTD. A more thorough style sheet than that distributed with Panorama is available at: ftp://ftp.hti.umich.edu/pub/panorama/isobook. ssh;Availability of the entire book in SGML will be posted on the Press's WWW server.

    http://www.press.umich.edu/bookhome/bordin/

    Journal of Electronic Publishing

    University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP), published by the University of Michigan Press, will make articles available in a search and retrievalmode using Open Text's PAT search engine. An SGML version is being tested( http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/jep-test.html) now and will be made available at a date to be determined. An HTML version of the journal is available at ttp://www.press.umich.edu/jep/. The SGML version will belocated at the same URL. The prototype of the SGML version of JEP uses the ISO 12083 article and serial DTDs.

    http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/

    Religious Texts

    A slowly growing collection of Religious Texts marked up by Jon Bosak of Novell Inc., including the Bible, the Quran and the Book of Mormon

    http://www.oclc.org:5046/oclc/research/panorama/contrib/religion/index.html

    CETH SGML Sampler

    A sample of SGML texts, encoded according to the TEI DTD, p3. Texts include: An English translation of Aesop's Fables; Eugene Onegin, by A. Pushkin; Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, by Sigmund Freud, including an article about Freud which references Zur Auffassung der Aphasien in several places; and Basta Callar, by Lope de Vega.

    http://www.princeton.edu/~gjmurphy/sgml/index.html

    WG8 Annual Report.

    Drafts of international standards under development, and related documents. Links to WG8 committee papers and to the WG8 annual report.

    http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/WG8/wg8home.htm

    Intel's Component Technical Documents

    A pilot system containing a sampling of Intel's electronic datasheets and application notes now provides documents in PCIS-Compliant SGML, searchable via a WAIS search engine.

    http://techdoc.wais.net:2160

    SoftQuad Panorama Demos

    A handful of demo files step you through the arguments for getting involved with full SGML on the Web. Anything you already know about HTML will stand you in good stead, but here are the reasons and their accompanying demos to show you how to move beyond HTML.

    If you already know about SGML, the same demos will show you what new capabilities you can now exploit on the Web.

    http://www.oclc.org:5046/oclc/research/panorama/demotbl.sgml

    When to Put Full SGML onto the Web

    HTML, the SGML application of the World Wide Web, remains the very best way to encode your home page. That way you'll always know that any browser -- including Panorama -- will be able to display it. However, there will be many cases when you may want to use something other than HTML:
  • When you already have documents richly marked up in another SGML application; now with Panorama being freely available to the world and being ported to multiple platforms, there are at least ten good reasons for serving full SGML to the desktop.
  • Whenever you run into something that HTML won't let you do, and that HTML doesn't quite support; the demo examples illustrate ...
  • When you have longer, more complex documents -- dictionaries, technical documentation, magazines, catalogs, government publications, academic journals, newspapers -- that you want to deliver using the world-wide distribution capabilities of the Web.
  • When you want greater control over the display of your on-line documents, control based not just on the element name (title, for example) but on the specific context of an element. (A title in a figure should be treated differently than a title of a book. You may want the first paragraph in a chapter to have different indentation from the others.)
  • When you want to include stylesheets with your document, so you can control an entire set of display styles -- or to offer a choice of styles.
    • Additional postings linked to this page provide tutorial assistance as well as sample files with a variety of kinds of markup.

    Putting SGML Online

    If You've Got SGML Today

    Assuming you have one or more DTDs you're already using, you have several choices:
  • Manually create stylesheets and navigators (those table of contents-like things that frequently appear at the left of the screen in Panorama). Use the samples in the entityrc directory as a guide. You may readily create new stylesheets and navigators by following the DTDs in the catalog directory, sheet.ent and nav.ent respectively.
  • Alternatively, purchase a license for the commercial version of the SoftQuad Panorama PRO software. From there, follow eight simple steps to get your SGML files onto the Web.
    •

    If You've Got HTML Today

    To use HTML with an SGML browser, you'll need to be a little more careful with the markup than many people have been in the past. You'll need to do two things:
  • Ensure that your files are valid HTML. There are a number of programs to check HTML documents, and you can also use a validating HTML editor such as SoftQuad HoTMetaL.
  • Make sure the HTML files begin with a DOCTYPE declaration that indicates the public identifier of the HTML DTD. Simply type this at the top of the file:
    • <!DOCTYPE html 
PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
    and then be sure to follow it with the start-tag: 
    <HTML>
    Similarly, the file needs to end with: 
    </HTML>
    Panorama is not a substitute for a full-blown Web browser; its strength is in its support for whatever tags anyone chooses to throw at it. It does not handle HTML forms or ISMAP; use your regular Web browser for that kind of functionality. HTML makes sense in Panorama only if you have regular text and graphics files and want to use the additional stylesheet or navigator or linking capabilities.

    If You've Got Neither HTML nor SGML

  • Create documents which use the same markup as the sample files shipped with Panorama. This markup is formally declared in Document Type Definitions (DTDs) which configure SGML software (such as Panorama or SGML editors and other browsers) to recognize their markup. Several DTDs are shipped with Panorama. There is a great variety, and we will provide a brief description of each in the next distribution (both of the free and pro versions) along with some documentation for them and sample files. Please note that using the sample files as examples will not ensure that the files you create are valid SGML. For that you should use SGML-based authoring or parsing tools. Panorama, like the Web browsers, is designed to be quite forgiving of SGML errors.
  • From there, follow six simple steps to get your SGML files onto the Web.
    •

    SGML Resources on the Web

    SoftQuad's The SGML Primer

    The SGML Primer's Introduction, The End-User's Eye View, is a useful, slightly technical starting point for learning about SGML in general.

    For learning about creating SGML applications -- which amounts to learning about reading and writing SGML DTDs -- browse the rest of SoftQuad's SGML Primer.

    Robin Cover's SGML Bibliography

    The bibliography provides a core list of references and abstracts for some 500 books and articles (as of May 1995). It updates the `General SGML bibliographies' also referenced there, but includes only references and abstracts, with a brief index. It does not include software, vendor lists, etc.

    The SGML Open Consortium

    SGML Open is a non-profit, international consortium of providers of products and services, dedicated to accelerating the further adoption, application, and implementation of SGML.

    SGML Open provides its members with an open forum to discuss market needs and directions, and to recommend guidelines for product interoperability. The consortium receives, coordinates, and disseminates information describing SGML methodologies, technologies, and implementations.

    Feedback

    We appreciate any comments about the usefulness of these listings -- please mail them to websgml-comments@sq.com. These comments may be published as part of the SGML on the Web Page.

    The NCSA/SoftQuad SGML on the Web Page is a joint production of NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and SoftQuad Inc. It is maintained by Lucy Ventresca and the staff of SoftQuad.

    Any information contained in SGML on the Web that was not provided by the University of Illinois was provided by the contributor or author, and inclusion does not reflect endorsement by the University or by SoftQuad. We reserve the right to reject or edit entries according to our standards.

    Copyright © 1995 by SoftQuad Inc., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.


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