The academic community also has a number of important initiatives underway consisting of among others the Text Encoding Initiative, an international project to provide encoding standards to support linguistic and literary research, and Encoded Archival Description. Most recently, there are a number of initiatives for developing DTDs for electronic commerce on the Internet and a wide variety of scientific and academic research. In order to understand why SGML has generated such broad interest from both users and developers, it is useful to consider the nature of markup and what kind of markup SGML promotes. Procedural Markup . In the last few years, through the use of word processing systems, we have become familiar with procedural markup.
Procedural markup consists of processing instructions to the computer.
It tells the computer what to do with specified components of the text. For example, the title of a major section might have instructions that tell the printer to center the text, use a font of a certain size, and perhaps print it in bold italics. Most procedural markup is characterized by being paper directed, that is, it tells the printer how to put the text on paper. If you want to do anything else with the text, the markup is not of much help. Nor does it help if you want to display the text on a computer screen, since paper presentation and monitor presentation are quite different.