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Many standards and policies exist that you already must follow. Each of these standards or policies that you obey is part of your overall environment. These standards are sort of like lakes or streams on the lot where your dream house stands. You have to adjust to them. They become a part of your daily life.
There are three types of standards that influence your documents: format, structure, and content. If you break all your standards down into these three categories, you’ll simplify your task of defining your environment, as well as prepare yourself for designing your environment later.
SGML does not specifically concern itself with format since its goal is to define and maintain the structural integrity of your documents. Format considerations depend on your SGML processing system, and the international standard is flexible enough to accommodate many approaches to format. Many SGML enterprises allow for several different formats of a document, such as spreadsheets that appear in service bulletins or in maintenance instruction manuals, each time with a different format. Commercial publishers have extensive format guidelines and policies, and SGML systems must be capable of rapid implementation of format changes. Fortunately, since SGML focuses on document structure, many of the format details are left to those who define the SGML processing systems involved.
• See “Structure, Content, and Format,” p. 35
Tip:
If you are a commercial publisher or produce unusually formatted documents, or if you must use unusual hardware in your SGML processing system, consult an SGML specialist who deals with enterprises like yours. He or she may be able to advise you on compatibility issues between your processing system and your related format issues.
Anything that describes a document appearance is a format standard. Format is like the make-up and costume of an actor. It’s not who the actor is or what role he’s playing. Format is decoration. It’s not the action or plot of your production.
If your standard deals with any of the following, it’s most likely a format standard:
Format standards aren’t always easy to identify. For example, style guides govern appearance, but they often deal with content and structure as well. Your style guide might specify titles that must appear in certain locations of a document, and might further specify that those titles appear in a 16-point Bookman bold typeface. The fact that the title must exist in only certain document locations would be a structural consideration. The details of font and point size are format considerations. You have to separate format from structure. Since SGML DTDs define document structures to a machine that processes them, it first must build the document correctly before it applies stylistic formats. If a machine incorrectly builds a document and places the document title at the end of a magazine article, it doesn’t really matter if the title appears in the correct size and font.
The trick is to always think of only three standards: format, structure, and content. For example, if asked what your format standard is, your answer is The Chicago Manual of Style. If asked what your structure standard is—The Chicago Manual of Style. And your content standard? The Chicago Manual of Style. You have to think of The Chicago Manual of Style as three different style guides. You have to think of one standard at a time.
Note:
Many standards can serve multiple purposes. A style guide might pass as the format standard as well as the structure standard. But ultimately, your format standard is that collection of sources that tell you what your documents look like. You might even keep exhibits of format examples as a sort of standard themselves.
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