Re: Tags (searching)

[Gary Preckshot <garrell@inreach.com>]

Greg Ferguson wrote:

> I thought it was to empower a document (and therefore an author)
> with structure, rather than having to rely on the (limiting)
> presentation-only aspects of a content piece.
> 

Nope. The early papers make clear that it was designed first
to avoid solving the same problem over and over (separating
authoring from presentation) and later for information
retrieval. Read Goldfarb's papers.

The first big application was predictably publishers. Even
now, publishers generally require some sort of markup,
typically with Word and a style sheet of their devising. The
real reasons behind this are the ubiquity of Word and the
publishers' practice of using a DTP package (usually Quark)
to format marked up text. Authors were only considered
generators of content. SGML was used to warehouse the
content and make possible controlled distribution in a
variety of formats. Controlled distribution includes
selective retrieval.

Gary


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