No Fear with SGML

Many of the work-flow problems you identified in "Work Flow Without Fear" (April) may be symptoms of either using proprietary data formats that tie the user to particular products (and limit the types of processing that can be done) or using APIs rather than data formats, which leads to monolithic systems. Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a highly successful ISO standard (ISO/IEC 8879:1986), allows a work flow of documents to be modularized: SGML can be used to def ine the interface format of the documents through the work flow. Apart from the extra certainty and rigor this can give to contracts for parts of a work-flow system, it also goes some way toward addressing some of the problems you mention.

Rick Jelliffe
Member, ISO Working Group on SGML
Sydney, Australia
ricko@allet te.com.au