If XML Is So Great, Why Bother With SGML?

If XML Is So Great, Why Bother With SGML?

Phillip A. Covington

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Considerable information about documentation systems can be found via this site, including information about SGML and XML. However, because XML (Extensible Markup Language) is becoming such a hot topic I've added this brief article solely to provide a quick answer to the above question that is currently on so many people's minds.

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This page last updated
29-Mar-1999

There is little doubt that XML is the future of not only the Web, but of documentation systems in general. The key word, however, is "future," because XML simply hasn't fully arrived yet. We are getting close, perhaps very close, but XML isn't quite here yet.

The full XML standard and the implementation of it have yet to be completed, and readily available commercial XML software tools and business applications have yet to hit the market.

Because XML is the direction of the future, major software applications such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0 and Adobe's FrameMaker are now "XML enabled." However, "enabled," and "full-featured" are two different things! In most cases this simply means that you can view or save files as XML, but you still don't have the capability of authoring new materials in XML or reading in existing XML files so that you can modify them. In contrast, Internet Explorer allows you to both view, edit, and create HTML files via its built-in FrontPage Express, and FrameMaker+SGML allows you to do the same thing with SGML files.

Software makers are definitely gearing up for XML, but it simply hasn't fully arrived yet. What do you do in the meantime? Despite some claims to the contrary, in reality XML is an extension of and almost identical to SGML, with enhancements added to make XML better suited to the Web, multimedia, etc. However, XML is still directly based upon and integrally tied to SGML. This means that almost the same software tools, techniques, and expertise are required to implement XML as is the case for SGML. In fact, your SGML documents and applications can easily be designed so that at such time XML technology becomes fully available, you can convert your SGML documents to XML with little more than the click of a mouse!

If you want solid, standards-based documentation systems today that will take your organization into the future your only choices are SGML and XML. If you don't care about or don't have need of all of the capabilities offered by a standardized and fully-featured documentation system, for which software and support is readily available, then you might wish to venture out and start using XML now. However, if your needs are typical of those of most organizations, your best option is probably to take advantage of the much larger base of existing SGML software and services with the plan being to move to XML when the time is right.

Your documentation systems vendor can show you how to set up your SGML systems to allow for an easy transition to XML. In addition, they should be able to help you minimize, where possible, your investment in the higher-end SGML development tools since the costs of equivalent XML tools, when they become available, will likely be lower. Lastly, it's worth pointing out that SGML is still the World's most widely used documentation format and language, and that even after XML is fully established SGML will continue to be used for many high-end documentation applications.