🚀 go-pugleaf

[Bill Downing]
|
|   A good book, authored by the "father of SGML", is Charles Goldfarb's
|   SGML Handbook published by Oxford University Press. This is about as
|   close as I've seen to an authoritative SGML text without actually
|   going to the ISO standard doc itself...

Huh?  Charles F. Goldfarb: The SGML Handbook (ISBN 0-19-853737-9)
_includes_ the text of ISO 8879 verbatim, in toto, with his annotations.
(It also has a tutorial on LINK, and an excellent overview of the
concepts and definitions in the standard, which helps organize them, and
ties them together.  I'd rate this overview as the most important part
of the book after having worn out one copy of it.)

Charles Goldfarb is the project editor for the SGML standard, and the
Handbook contains the text of the standard with amendment 1, and with
the clarifications proposed by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 18/WG 8.  This means
that The SGML Handbook is arguably more authoritative than the standard.

If there is any source of information on SGML, the language and the
standard, this book is it.  Joan Smith and Robert Stutely: SGML: A
User's Guide to ISO 8879 (ISBN 0-7458-0221-4 or ISBN 0-470-21126-1)
contains a very valuable index of the public entities defined in the
standard, with a typical glyph for each.

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