In my quest to find products which will fit nicely together to form a 
multi-medium publishing environment I am sorry to report that so far DTD 
development seems to be the one thing preventing the widespread adoption 
of the SGML standard.  Microsoft Word Style sheets have made me too soft.

I thought I had the problem licked when I found out about SoftQuad's 
RulesBuilder but today I discovered that it converts SGML DTD's into 
binary rules files for use with the same company's Author-Editor SGML 
word processor.  This was the same type of disapointment I experienced a 
few days earlier when I installed my beta copy of WP SGML edition only to 
discover that not only didn't it help me create DTDs but it also required 
the conversion of DTDs to a proprietary binary file before the Word 
Processor could use it.

Whatever happened to the old create-modify a style element and associate 
the formatting some of us have learned to grow fond of with Word?

Now granted, I'm not stupid.  The bit of research I have done in what 
makes up SGML reveals it to be a very well thought out standard 
(especially when Hytime is included for hypermedia links etc...) and that 
the eventual migration towards strict content structure and intelligent 
documents will make this a better world etc...  But what good is it all 
if writing the damn DTDs is so ardious?  Will this not hamper the 
adoption of SGML into the real world?

Here's what I need to know:  Are there any tools out there that let 
content experts (not programmers) write DTDs?  As well, is there a public 
listing and repository of existing DTDs to work from?

Frustrated (and running out of time...)







From rballard@cnj.digex.net Wed Aug 30 02:14:03 1995
Status: O
X-Status: