🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Oct18.201850.9304@cbnewsi.att.com> hrs1@cbnewsi.att.com (herman.r.silbiger) writes:

   I have heard much about the advantage of not having a standardized
   architecture, which will allow so much freedom in a publishing
   environment.  However, I have never seen or heard of such an
   instance where the ODA architecture could not decscribe the
   structure of a document.  If you know of such an example, please
   describe it.

The system I designed for Oslo's financial daily's electronic news
agency uses attributes to represent internal state information.  We
use marked sections to write different versions of an article, so that
the journalist can chose which one to send when some political or
economic decision has been made.  We make extensive use of entities to
represent ticker codes (also extremely useful for indexing).
Interviews are represented like this:

    <que>Question or interviewer comment</>
    <rep i="NN" name="Nomen Nescio">Reply or other comment</>
    <rep i="AA" name="Anton Aardvark">Reply or other comment</>
    <que>Another question</>
    <rep i="NN">Another reply from NN</>
    ... etc.

None of these can conveniently be described by ODA.

Generally speaking, you can probably describe any document with both,
but as far as I have looked into ODA, the granularity is not entirely
of your own choice.  The power of the ODA Generic layout model (I've
forgot what ODA calls it), is not anywhere near the power of the SGML
DTD.  This is intentional in ODA.  Too powerful tools makes for harder
interoperability.  (Thus a valid argument against SGML in general, but
not the specific instances of its use.)

I'm currently working on a project to represent a stock exchange
ticker with sufficiently intelligent "markup" to be used for several
kinds of display and processing purposes.  An idea spawned off this
project is representing EDI documents in a human readable form, and
SGML seems to be up to the task.  I don't even know if you could have
EDI documents in an ODA environment.  Anybody who cares to comment?

Then there's the demands on the processing environment.  An ODA
environment needs to be pretty extensive to be useful, whereas an SGML
environment could start with only a few hundred lines of Emacs lisp
code.  In most of the cases I've seen, interoperability with other
systems is not that important, anyhow, which would make ODA overkill.
Intelligent searching and indexing tools, however, has been much more
important.  It is easier to do this with SGML, and furthermore, the
user can look at the SGML encoded document without an intelligent
parser.  This latter has had enormous importance with my clients.
Your milage may vary, of course.

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[Erik Naggum]		Naggum Software; Gaustadalleen 21; 0371 OSLO; NORWAY
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