In the late 60s, I had the privilege of working for a while with a master typesetter who was soon to retire and was lamenting that he was retiring just when technology was about to revolutionize the whole composition business. The project we worked on together happened to be the last hot-metal-based project for either one of us, because the revolution had begun.

This book is intended for people who need to understand the basics of that revolution and of the SGML technology that is such a vital part of it. More importantly, this book is for people who need to understand how publishing applications and publishing systems can be built around this technology to achieve a wide variety of objectives, the most critical of which is the systematic development and maintenance and use of the enterprise's information assets.

This book will not make you an SGML "techie" but will enable you to understand a good deal of what the techies say and do and why they do it. It will prepare you to participate in SGML document analysis and application design, if that is a goal. And it will help you prepare to deal with vendors of publishing system products and system integration services, should that be part of your responsibility.

To this end, the book covers the conceptual underpinnings of generalized markup, an introduction to the specifics of SGML, and discussions of application design and system implementation. The focus is on the way the information asset and the publication products can be designed and developed for the optimum value to the enterprise as an information provider, and to the information consumers that are served by that information development and publishing function.