The Lesson of SGML

In early 1995, I helped start a company, E-Doc, with a subversive business plan based on the premise that big publishing companies (in this case, in the scientific-technical-medical arena) might want to publish on the World Wide Web. I say “subversive” because at the time it was just that—the very companies we were targeting with our services were the old guard of the publishing world, and they had every reason in the world to suppress and reject these new technologies. A revolution was already occurring, especially in the world of scientific publishing. Through the Internet, scientists were beginning to share papers with other scientists. While the publishing companies weren't embracing this new medium, the scientists themselves ...

Get XML and SQL: Developing Web Applications now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.