Processing SGML documents
Jos Warmer, Hans J. van der Vliet · Electronic Publishing - Origination, Dissemination and Design · 1991
SUMMARY SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is an ISO Standard that specifies a language for document representation. The main idea behind SGML is to strictly separate the structure and contents of a document from the processing of that document. This results in application-independent and thus reusable documents. To gain the full benefit of this approach, tools are needed to support a wide range of applications. The Standard itself does not define how to specify the processing of documents. Many existing SGML systems allow for a simple translation of an SGML document, which exhibits a 1‐1 correspondence between elements in the SGML document and its translation. For many applications this does not suffice. In other systems the processing can be expressed in a special-purpose programming language. In this paper the various approaches to processing SGML documents are assessed. We also discuss a novel approach, taken in the Amsterdam SGML Parser. In this approach, processing actions are embedded in the grammar rules that specify the document structure, much like processing actions are embedded in grammars of programming languages that are input to a parser generator. The appendix contains an extended example of the use of this approach.