[1261] in RISKS Forum
Re: Tunnel vision of Computer Society CD-ROM
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Y. Ts'o)
Fri Aug 30 16:02:22 1996
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 16:01:44 -0400
From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
To: Geoff Kuenning <geoff@ficus.cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: risks@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Geoff Kuenning's message of Wed, 28 Aug 1996 12:12:24 -0700
Actually, storing its articles in SGML was the right choice for the IEEE
to have made. The reason for this is that SGML is a platform
independent format --- SGML, or "Standard Generalized Markup Language"
is an ISO standard ISO 8879:1986. While the CD-ROM may have only had
viewers for Macintosh, Windows 3.1, and a few Unix platforms, it's much
more likely that an article formatted in SGML will have viewers
available on other platforms than, (for example) if the articles were
stored in Microsoft Word format.
A few more words about SGML. What's really good about SGML is that it
is designed to deal with *structured* text. You don't specify things
like "Times-Roman-Italics, 10 point"; instead you specify "book title",
and leave it to the SGML viewer to put the text of the book title in the
appropriate font. This is important, because different platforms have
different fonts available to them; and 100 years from now, who knows
what fonts will be available by default.
An SGML document has a prologue where it declares its Document Type
Definition (DTD). The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is used
by the Web, is a DTD. Other examples of SGML include the QWERTZ DTD,
which provides most of the facilities of LaTeX, and the LinuxDoc SGML,
which is derived from the QWERTZ DTD, and which is the standardized
format for the Linux Documentation Project (LDP). The LDP has provided
Linuxdoc-SGML translators which will take the Linuxdoc-SGML and
translate it into LaTeX, groff, HTML, and texinfo. (And of course, from
all of these formats, you can then get postscript or Adobe PDF).
So the mere fact that the IEEE CD-ROM is using SGML does not mean that
they have "stumbled badly". What's really important is what DTD did
they use to format their articles, and is that DTD documented so that
other people can write their own SGML translators. Of course, it would
have been best if the IEEE could have provided the source to the SGML
translators, but there may have been licensing issues barring them from
doing so.
Could you use raw ASCII text instead of SGML? Of course. However, you
would lose all the nice formatting that you would get if you were
reading the article in printed form. Things like diagrams and graphics
would be lost. The advantage of using SGML is that all of this
information is preserved, and assuming that the definition of the DTD is
public, it shouldn't be difficult to write a SGML -> raw text
translator. It would no doubt lose information during this
transformation, but that's what you get if you insist on viewing things
using raw text.
- Ted
