First of all, we admire creativity, variety, and initiative, and we have no intention of burdening authors with arbitrarily restrictive or overly complex rules. We want to see a vast assortment of accessible, stable, and interoperable electronic scholarship come into being. That vision guides whatever tactics we adopt. The Stoa will continuously explore, implement, and disseminate information about the best available technical practices and solutions to problems in electronic publication as they emerge. We expect that XML will prove to be extremely important over time and we want to be engaged in its specific application to humanities publications.
Descriptive markup indicates the nature, function and type of content of a document.
So in SGML you describe the structural divisions of your document and its textual features , for example, a chapter, a scene, a bibliography, special characters, grammatical structure, etc, rather than how your document is supposed to look . An SGML document is not tied to a particular computer program or platform, which insures the widest of audiences over time. In addition, SGML markup allows readers to approach SGML documents in many different ways. For example, a reader of a play encoded in SGML could not only read the play but conduct searches for lines spoken by a specific character in a specific context. For these reasons SGML is recognized internationally as a standard for publishing electronic information.