emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (07/07/90)
(a copy of this posting has been forwarded to news.announce.newgroups) this is a call for discussion for the newsgroup 'comp.text.sgml', to discuss the ISO 'Standard General Markup Language' and systems which use it. SGML promises to be an important player in the market for electronic texts, either the kind where you browse through the OED, maintain a reference document which is presented in both paper and electronic forms, or write a thesis. Several commercial products use SGML internally to store the form of the document (though most are not capable of dealing with an arbitrary set of SGML tags). the immediate prompting for this was a message that I received asking if I was going to the SGML-TeX conference in the Netherlands, and realizing that there was not a recognizable spot on the net that I could forward the question to in the hopes of finding someone who was. the newsgroup idea has come up before; the hope is that there's enough interest to make it go. the group is expected to have an international audience; the initial query yielded positive replies from Norway, Sweden, the U.K., the Netherlands, Canada, Ireland, and (oh by the way) the U.S.A. It looks like the initial trolling for interest picked up a mix of gurus, users, academics, and commercial interests, so I'm pretty sure things will work once they get started. so to the details. the name: comp.text.sgml. seems reasonable. the discussion: one initial task to get everyone who is on the net that is doing software development to know and recognize each other, and to take stock of what resources are available. This discovery phase should yield tangible products like references to bibliographies, software available or under development etc. another goal is to bring together people who have texts that they have marked up, or are in the process of marking up, and to discover and share appropriate strategies for same. this is my interest; I have a large mass of textual data and some powerful text searching software, but I need a sensible markup strategy to retrieve appropriate pieces of this thing. why not just post to comp.text? there's so little discussion, why a group? why not just a mailing list? indeed, why not take over comp.text? It has been tried. The number of SGML experts on the net (compared to users) is small, and they don't have time to time to wade through troff, psfig, Word Perfect etc. The last 30 or so articles of comp.text, I see one or perhaps two which are relevant to comp.text.sgml. so where are people going with questions? well to me. or to one or more other scattered lists, including INFO-NETS, GOVDOC-L, comp.editors, soc.college, maybe a few others that I don't read or haven't found. No single group has the quantity of expertise or the focus of readership. mailing lists are evil and rude, esp. those that cross international boundaries; given that I expect fully 2/3 of the discussion to originate in Europe, a newsgroup is the only sane way to propagate the discussion around. The vote: Not yet, to play by the books there must be a period of discussion preceding the vote, and it must be announced in news.announce.newgroups. The entire procedure top to bottom takes more than a month. followups to comp.text (put SGML in the Subject:), or news.groups for procedural matters. --Ed Edward Vielmetti, U of Michigan math dept <emv@math.lsa.umich.edu> comp.archives moderator