The structure and data collected is to be discussed on friday again. Several DTDs were presented. The most commonly used text processingsystem is MS Word. Therefore conversion strategies for Word have been developed and widely used. There are still a lot of unsolved problems.
Many people have to deal with manual conversion, which is time consuming.
If the author writes their own SGML, there needs to be a validation mechanism built into Word. For the encoding of mathematical and chemical information, there is no authoring solution yet, which could be presented to potential authors for writing their documents. The free XML editors are not suited to natural writing of large complex documents as theses and dissertations. Commercial tools provide some support for XML and SGML but no validation. It seems more likely that authors would continue to use commercial products even if they also use XML tools to mark up their work.