Book details of 'Readme. 1st: Sgml for Writers and Editors/Book and Disk (Charles F. Goldfarb Series on Open Information Management)'

Title	Readme. 1st: Sgml for Writers and Editors/Book and Disk (Charles F. Goldfarb Series on Open Information Management)
Author(s)	Ronald C. Turner, Timothy A. Douglass, Audrey J. Turner
ISBN	0134327179
Language	English
Published	January 1996
Publisher	Prentice Hall

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
My own book first started life as a seminar outline and notes. It then developed into a serially published column on the net. In the second edition, I put in a lot of hours with the typesetting company, trying to determine the best format for printing not terribly well defined objects such as fully qualified domain names (FQDN) and URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). If I'd done the book (properly) in SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) in the first place, a lot of this would have been a lot easier. A properly structured SGML document can be used to produce appropriate designations for, say, a URL in both a Usenet postings (which has very limited formatting possibilities) and a book (which has considerably more). It can also make the modification of such a designation much easier, and have it take affect throughout an entire document at the next generation. Those who are familiar with SGML will consider this to be an overly lengthy and unnecessary introduction. In the same way, they might consider the first three chapters of this book expended on the "selling" of SGML to be inessential. On the other hand, while I was doing my own review of this book, I happened across a review by someone else, and they had obviously missed the point entirely. SGML is not merely a formatting language like TeX or even HTML, but a way to concentrate on what a piece of writing does, and let the downstream machinery take care of what it eventually needs to look like. This is because "README.1ST" is the first work to be written for the non- technical end user of SGML: the writer or editor. There are a number of concepts to be raised, and paradigm shifts in the way the production of documents is to be viewed. (One can hear echoes of writers objecting to this emphasis on "structure" in the repeated exhortation that the use of structure does not have to stifle creativity.) The authors have put in a lot of work, ensuring that the dedicated, if naive, student can understand SGML and how it works. Dedication *is* going to be required of the newcomer. It takes a while to realize that *any* piece of writing has a design. This book, in fact, might not be only for writers and editors. I strongly suspect that teachers of English, composition and even creative writing would find ideas in this material that will assist students in striving for excellence in communication. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1996
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