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From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml
Subject: Re: Is there a DTD standard?
Message-ID: <BZS.90Sep11225016@world.std.com>
Date: 12 Sep 90 02:50:16 GMT
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Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Organization: The World
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In-Reply-To: crowl@cs.rochester.edu's message of 12 Sep 90 02:02:42 GMT


There are some books which describe sample DTD's, for example "SGML:
An Author's Guide" by Martin Bryan (Addison-Wesley.)

But none of these things is authoritative.

If no one can come forward with an authoritative DTD why don't those
of us who understand a little about this stuff come up with a DTD
right here? If nothing else the discussions surrounding that should be
informative to those trying to learn more. We can call it "The USENET
SGML DTD" and put it into the public domain. If it seems reasonable
I'll use it for "The Online Book Initiative", we've been using some of
our own conventions but it wouldn't be hard to conform.

There's nothing wrong with using previous DTD's for starters, just as
one would use other conventions when trying to pick elements.

Here's my contribution:

	<pp>		begin paragraph
	</pp>		end paragraph

and the common convention that <XYZ> is ended by </XYZ> where needed.

And my first question:

	Are we happy with the convention &char-name to encode non-ascii
	characters (e.g. &oumlaut), how far along is the Text Encoding
	Initiative with this? Can we use their conventions yet?

"Your" move.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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