 PREFACEThis book grew out of dismay on the one hand and enthusiasm on the other. Like many who work with documents that must move among various platforms and systems, we were dismayed at the effort that we needed to spend repeatedly just to move one from here to there to do this and that. For us, moving documents meant learning every sort of transfer trick we could devise: downloading and uploading, exporting and importing, converting with third- party tools, scanning, and writing pieces of ad hoc conversion code to make it all work. Our enthusiasm came from the promise of SGML. If SGML were indeed a standard that applied itself in a generalized manner, then it would let us spend more of our lives writing, editing, and producing documents and less time moving them around and recycling them. But we were also dismayed at how difficult it seemed to know where to begin with SGML. True, the standard is in place, the tools are on the market, there is an active and helpful community on the Internet, and the various methodologies are working for a multitude of writers. But we could find nothing like a "One-Stop SGML" that would give the novice everything neces- sary to achieve SGML productivity. This book and its ancillary software were the result: a true introduction to the standard, a readable introduction to the essentials of SGML, and sufficient desktop software to enable the reader to get productive with SGML. These are austere times for writers. Budgets for dedicated technical writing groups are shrinking or disappearing. Writing is being forced "upstream," onto the desktops and benchtops of engineers, researchers, technicians and even secretaries. And this workplace cannot generally afford the luxury of week-long training sessions, on-site or at some hotel far away. Instead we must now engage in "just-in-time learning." README.1ST is a learning tool for this new breed of publishers. We have attempted to address each new topic by starting in familiar territory and moving intuitively into a more formal discussion of that topic. The presentation is therefore more verbose than you yourself would be in writing technical documentation. Also, you will find several instances of repeated discussion on the same topic. This sort of review, while perhaps out of place in a reference document, helps the reader of a textbook to "nail down" troublesome and unfamiliar concepts. A persistent concern for writers unaccustomed to formal standards is that a standard like SGML will some how deprive them of their creativity. Our first and probably most important task therefore is to convince you that SGML enables and supports a writer's creativity. It does so by allowing him or her to concentrate on creating text for a document without having to worry about how the document will appear. How you decide to use README.1ST depends both on your job description and on your learning style. If you are a manager faced with the decision of whether to commit to the SGML standard, then you should read at least the first three chapters. If you are a writer who wishes only to get the idea of how standard markup fits within the scheme of electronic documents, you should study carefully the first five chapters. Chapters six through eight cover the essential syntax of an SGML document type definition (DTD). "But do I really need to know about a DTD, what with all the SGML editing tools currently on the market?" While we devote a good part of Chapter twelve answering that question, we suggest that being able to read a DTD intelligently is like having available the "Reveal Codes" feature of a popular word processor--it means that you can always see what is really going on in your document. And while we do not target this book to designers of document types, we progressively design and build a DTD as the core of our discussion over several chapters. Watching a DTD develop in step-wise fashion into the definition of a rather robust hypertext document proves to be a satisfying and effective method for understanding both the what and the why of a DTD. Today there is enormous interest in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the markup scheme for documents on the World-Wide Web. We offer a close-up look at HTML that lets you understand HTML as a particular application of SGML. This will provide you with an insight into HTML that goes far beyond the beginner's concerns over which tags to put where. At this point in a preface authors typically lament the travails of having gotten a project finally into print. Yes, we neglected several contracting opportunities in our company, our family lives suffered, house plants died from lack of attention, pets did not get petted as they ought, dust gathered where it ought not, and all of the other things happened that we find in the litanies of most prefaces. But one such common phenomenon did not happen to us: burnout. We are no less excited about SGML and its benefits than when we began this project. We hope that README.1ST succeeds in conveying that same excitement to you. Ronald C. Turner Timothy A. Douglass Audrey J. Turner Soph-Ware Associates swa@soph-ware.com |
