XML Companion, The, Third Edition

SGML

The generalized markup concept emerged in the early 1960s, but did not become well established until the introduction of SGML (see Chapter 32), which was ratified by the ISO in 1986.

SGML has remained essentially unchanged in its first ten years of use. It is certainly a measure of how robust SGML was from the beginning that a decade passed before even minor revisions were considered necessary. Indeed, the specification for SGML was perhaps too advanced, with several of its features to this day under-utilized.

Yet it is the very power of SGML that has been its major handicap. Development of software to support even a typical subset of the language is a huge programming task. SGML-aware applications have therefore tended to be slow in arriving, ...