Separation of formatting...

[Sean Mc Grath]

The "separation of formatting..."
mantra is a big part of SGML/XML obviously.
However, it works on a number of levels.

Here is a pieces of data marked up three ways:-

Version 1 : Purely Formatting Mindset (RTF)
         "{\i Customer} Joe Bloggs \par" 

Version 2 : SGML - Generic Markup
        <p><i>Customer</i>Joe Bloggs</p>

Version 3 : SGML - Data Modelling
        <Customer>Joe Bloggs</Customer>

I think for some poople, SGML is all about
Version 2 above. Entire books have been written that
use SGML to abstract the concepts of "paragraph",
"artwork" etc. from the typographic codes required to
achieve the result. (The DTD in Annex E of the handbook
is an example of this sort of mindeset).

Somewhere along the line, people started thinking
as in version 3 above. I have no idea when this
started to happen. Anyone out there know?

Sean Mc Grath
http://www.digitome.com/sean.htm
County Sligo, Ireland, Tel: +353 96 47391



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