Special Edition Using SGML:Understanding the Old Paradigm

The Role of Structure

Under the linear model of organizing information, structure pales in importance. Formatting tries to do all the work. Because everything is presented in a linear sequence, structure is arbitrary. You can structure a document according to its content or the intrinsic structure of the type of document. It doesn’t make much difference. You still have to pick up the book and turn to the page where the information is. The information never comes to you, as it does when you browse a World Wide Web page.

With linearly organized information, you must follow the rules that the physical structure imposes on you. For example:

• You have to access the whole book in order to access part of it. You have to pick it up before you can find the page with the information that you want.

• You must go to the information; it does not come to you. You have to go to the library or borrow a book from someone.

• You have limited opportunity to interact with the information. You cannot make notes to the author. You have to take the information as is.

• You cannot make your own book. It costs too much. You do not know how to bind your own books, much less distribute them. You need a specialist.

The Whole Book or No Book Problem

Although books might appear to be modular, they cannot be easily broken down into smaller information chunks. You cannot rip out part of a book and take it home from the library with you. This whole book or no book problem can be a challenge. Under the new paradigm, it’s not a problem.

The new paradigm, which includes SGML, is extraordinary. You no longer have to choose either the whole book or none of it. You can now make electronic links among books. Before, you could write a book and invite libraries to stock it. Now you can write a book and link it to every other relevant book electronically.

SGML allows electronic publishers and their readers a more collaborative relationship with their work. This “my book, our book” technique becomes possible as information becomes more granular. The modular approach to organizing knowledge makes this possible. Because you can easily add links to modules of information to any book, no book needs to be completely written.

How many times have you wished that you could have had another day, week, or month on a deadline for a book or a school paper? Deadlines will always exist, but you at least have the satisfaction of knowing your work does not have to stop. Through SGML, you can always add more information later, and everyone else can add links to further information if you want. Suppose that you have written the consummate work on the procreative habits of insects. Someone writing in the same area can add a link that relates directly to what you have done. Both works can be added to indefinitely by others.

The Stationary Information Problem

You can always take a book with you to the doctor’s office or a ball game. Books are somewhat portable. The physical structure of a book, however, does not allow much flexibility in how you access information outside the book itself. For example, if the book was about baseball, and it referred to a statistic you’d like to double-check, you’d be out of luck. That information is portable unless it happens to be included in the book, and the factuality of the book is exactly what you’re questioning. Also, you have the problem that the book must present its information in only one format. What if you and a friend both want to use the same baseball book, but the friend needs it in large print and you prefer small print? Then what do you do?

This is part of the stationary structure of information under the old paradigm. You can’t always take it with you. When you reduce information to smaller streams of highly-portable electronic language marked up according to SGML, though, you can send it anywhere you want. Information under the new paradigm is completely portable. Not only will you be able to take it with you—as with a laptop computer with a cellular Internet connection—you one day might also take a smaller computer shaped as a paperback book in your back pocket while you are backpacking in the mountains.

Tip:
Because you can make every character and symbol its own information module under the new paradigm, you can take all information with you wherever you go as long as you have a portable computing device. Information access devices under the new paradigm can become as commonplace as hand-held calculators, thanks to highly granular and standardized portable SGML information structures.

The Once and for All Information Problem

Discoveries that refute previously held ideas happen all the time. This is good, and as it should be, but it makes publishing a challenge under the old paradigm. Information retrieval evolves, and information delivery should as well. The linear model of information delivery makes this difficult, though. Once you have published your book and it has gone out to bookstores, you can’t correct a mistake on page 275. However, information in standardized SGML structures that is online and accessible by means of a computer connected to a network can be updated at any time. The new paradigm overcomes the “once and for all” information problem.

Note:
The old paradigm restricts thinking in terms of time and space. Once a book is distributed to bookstores, you have to wait until enough copies have been sold to justify another printing. If you made a mistake on page 275, you have to live with it—possibly for a long time.
The time dimension is behind the once and for all problem. Once you accept that information delivery must evolve just as information itself does—that the information delivery process is ongoing—the problem begins to solve itself. The new paradigm makes the time dimension less important and allows information delivery to evolve alongside the information itself.

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