Most of all, I owe a sincere thanks to my wife, Kaye, for her tireless support and understanding during the preparation of this book. Any success that it may achieve is largely due to her (the mistakes, omissions, and foibles are all my own).

Martin Colby

To Tish for her endless love, support, and strength. She owns my heart forever.

Dave Jackson

About the Authors

Martin Colby is a computer systems consultant in SGML system development, implementation, and design currently living in San Diego, California. He is particularly enthusiastic about SGML due to its potential as an enabling technology. He expects it to be a key part of the solution to making the knowledge of the Library of Congress available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. A perpetual wanderer, he occasionally gets homesick for his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

David S. Jackson is a freelance writer who lives in San Diego. He writes both fiction and technical manuals, and recently was a contract technical writer and documentation specialist with Solar Turbines where he met Martin Colby. SGML has given him the hope that anyone can become a publisher via the World Wide Web, professional in quality if not in size. He and his wife Tish are expecting their first baby in March of 1996.

Steven J. DeRose earned his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Brown University in 1989. He served as director of the early “FRESS” hypertext system there. He has worked as a technical writer and design consultant for the CDWord hypertext system and a variety of other systems in computational linguistics, hypermedia, and related fields. He has published a variety of papers on markup systems, hypertext, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and other topics, plus a book with David Durand entitled Making Hypermedia Work: A User’s Guide to HyTime. He is now Senior System Architect at Electronic Book Technologies, whose DynaText product is the leading SGML-based software for delivering large-scale electronic books on CD-ROM, disk, LAN, and the Internet. He is very active in standards development, serving with groups including the ANSI and ISO SGML and HyTime groups, the Text Encoding Initiative, and several Internet and Web-related groups. He lives, works, and ice-skates in Rhode Island with his wife Laurie and their 2-year-old son Todd.

Bob DuCharme, an SGML developer at the Research Institute of America, is the author of The Operating Systems Handbook. He holds a BA in religion from Columbia University and will soon complete a masters degree in computer science at New York University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Jennifer and their daughter Made.

David Durand is a Senior Analyst with Dynamic Diagrams in Providence, RI. He is co-author, with Steven J. DeRose, of Making Hypermedia Work: A User’s Guide to HyTime. He worked on the Text Encoding Initiatives Syntax and Metalanguage committee and the Hypertext Committee, defining standards for the use of SGML to encode literary texts of scholarly interest. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Boston University.

Elli Mylonas is in the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University where she works with structured text and hypertext. Before this, she was Managing Editor of the Perseus Project at Harvard University, which used SGML for all its texts. She has been working with and publishing on SGML since 1986.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my co-author, Dave Jackson, for his enthusiasm and patience as we created this book together.

There are too many other people to thank as well: my friends and co-workers at Solar, Litton, and Syscon who have taught me much with their own unique and helpful perspectives, and the super crew at Que who do so much to include quality in their titles. Lastly, I’d like to thank Ludo for his original, creative, and humorous outlook on the world of SGML. (Ludo, I owe you a Ben & Jerry’s the next time you’re in town.)

Martin Colby

Thanks to Martin for his patience, goodness, and all that native talent. Last but never least, thanks to all of Que’s team, whose skillful hands never left the tiller. Thanks for believing in me.

Dave Jackson