🚀 go-pugleaf

[Thomas Driemeyer]
:
|   The format of the SGML documents should be published and accessible
|   though, so that everyone can add books without having to use external
|   service bureaus. If the format is closed, Insight might suffer the same
|   fate as the license server.

I don't know anything useful about Insight, and was alerted to this
message, but at least I know about SGML.

SGML is an International Standard (ISO 8879), and has been since 1986, and
has been one of ISO's best selling standards.  So "the format of the SGML
documents" is at least partially easily available.  The standard, however,
is not the whole story.  An SGML document conforms to a document type
definition (DTD), and it's really the DTD that defines the names of the
elements (information containers) in the document and their meaning, since
SGML does not specify processing in any way.  The language is "only" a
means to represent a structure of nested information containers as a string
of characters (file, if you want); the rest is up to an application of SGML
to a specific kind of structure.  The good news is that the DTD must be
available with all SGML documents conforming to them, so somewhere on the
system, there should be a concise description of each element, and how they
interrelate, usually in the form of the SGML "document type declaration":
look for the string "<!DOCTYPE" and see what it references.

For more information, see comp.text.sgml, or mail me.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,
</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum                 ISO  8879 SGML                    +47 295 0313
Oslo, Norway                ISO 10744 HyTime
<erik@naggum.no>            ISO  9899 C                 Memento, terrigena
<SGML@ifi.uio.no>           ISO 10646 UCS             Memento, vita brevis