SGML on the Web;
Small Steps Beyond HTML
ISBN: 0-13-519984-0
Pages: 500 + CD-ROM
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Authors: Yuri Rubinsky and Murray Maloney
If Charles Goldfarb was the father of SGML, Yuri Rubinsky was certainly its soul. The late Yuri Rubinsky was a co-founder of SoftQuad, a co-founder of SGML Open, and an advisor to industry, government, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the International Committee for Accessible Document Design. He was instrumental in the growth of SGML, the development of HTML 2.0, and in developing SGML markup for the visually disabled.
Murray Maloney is a member of the HTML Editorial Review Board, the XML Editorial Review Board, and is an active participant in the International Committee for Accessible Document Design. He participated in the Davenport Group and is active in the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation.
Dedication: This book is dedicated to the late Yuri Rubinsky (1952 to 1996).
Intended Audience: This book is intended for those who will be engaged in Web publishing, but for whom HTML is simply not enough. It foreshadows XML by providing strategies to use HTML in ways that can provide a richness beyond simply rendering data on a screen.
Summary:
SGML on the Web; Small Steps Beyond HTML is designed as a cook-book for those that require more functionality on the Web. It provides common techniques for using both HTML and SGML on the Web. The book contains 40 examples that show the reader what they need to know to publish on the Web.
Part One of the book contains three chapters. It quickly provides a foundation for anyone who understands the basics of HTML publishing. It defines HTML, SGML, and provides comparisons. The fundamentals of SGML are presented using a tutorial approach.
Part Two provides another 15 examples that help the reader better understand the capabilities of HTML and introduce ways to extend HTML. At the conclusion of this part of the book, the reader will understand what goes on "under the hood". The reader is introduced to HTML tags by groups; first heads and paragraphs, then lists, font changes, and empty display objects such as the break (<br>) and horizontal rule (<hr>). As each new HTML tag is introduced, a DTD modeling for that element is presented. Readers quickly see that HTML is an application of SGML. In this part of the book, links (both HTML and SGML) are introduced. And finally a way to extend HTML into SGML by adding simple elements to the HTML DTD is demonstrated. Once readers add a "new" element to the HTML DTD, they have moved one small step beyond HTML into the realm of SGML. This part of the book clearly demonstrates that by using SGML as a markup declaration language, readers can create any markup they want and have it clearly understood and interpreted "now and in the future."
Parts Three and Four of the book go far beyond HTML and provide tutorials to help the reader understand more advanced SGML including parameter entities, public identifiers, and hypertext linking.
The book provides a number of appendices which include the SGML Primer, and descriptions of new products, industry standards, and books. The authors of the book have included a CD-ROM of related materials as well.
SGML on the Web; Small Steps Beyond HTML is a good book for those who want to understand HTML, SGML or both. Its easy reading and the tutorial nature makes a technically difficult subject easy to understand.
Beyond that, this book lays the foundation upon which XML was originally built. In the preface, Yuri Rubinsky calls for extending HTML within a "stable framework" in a manner so that Web software knows "what to expect". He focuses on creating markup that is rich, yet easy to use. And he proposes that "inventing new markup makes sense" if a method can be devised so the new markup holds "no surprises." Those who have been following the development of XML as an alternate Web language may quite easily be convinced that this has come about, in part, through Yuri's final guidance.
