🚀 go-pugleaf

Piercarlo Grandi <pcg@aber.ac.uk> writes:
|
|   jem> Is SGML useful in defining such a tool?
|
|   Not SGML's type of job -- more like SQL's.

SGML is a description language, while SQL is a query language.  There's
nothing to keep you from applying SQL to an SGML document treated as a
relational data base.  SGML certainly has the power to describe it,
although you probably would build a more efficient system for your
access needs.  SGML has been used as the interchange format between
dissimilar RDBMS's with great success, for instance.

Tables pose great challenges in all descriptive languages, since people
tend to be overly interested in table layout, and understanding how to
separate the information in a table from its layout is not complete.

Jim McCauley's definition is right on track, but tables get very hairy
once you go beyond the clean, two-dimensional tables, and into three- or
four-dimensional information structures mapped into two dimensions in a
table with subheadings, categories, footnotes and cross-references.  We
know a lot about how these beasts should be formatted, but the "database
for the eyes" approach could perhaps point us in the right direction for
understanding the information structures involved that are now largely
implicit in the table designer's mind.

Best regards,
</Erik>
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Erik Naggum             |  ISO  8879 SGML     |      +47 295 0313
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