Silmaril Consultants
The Information Consultancy
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About XML and SGML
 | What XML and SGML can do for you |
These two technologies provide a vendor-neutral, stable format for the storage or transmission of your text or data. This gives you independence from any specific make or model of hardware or software. The format is non-proprietary and is fixed by international agreement, so your data cannot be obsoleted or hijacked by version changes.
SGML and XML also let you store your information separately from its formatting, so you only have to maintain one master copy, which you can then use in many ways: on the Web, in print, on a CD-ROM, in audio or video or even Braille, or use it as input to a database. There are conversion systems available to output SGML and XML in almost any format.
Why Silmaril uses SGML and XML
People with responsibility for corporate, sensitive, or important information need to be sure that the information is stored or transmitted safely, durably, and productively, in a persistent format which is independent of changes in technology. SGML-based systems like XML allow us to offer this kind of solution.
XML in particular offers a degree of flexibility not available in other formats, and it is becoming the common language for data representation and transmission.
 | Where did this all come from? |
The Standard Generalized Markup Language is an international standard (ISO 8879:1986) for specifying ways to describe information. It has been in use for over 15 years and is very stable, with a solid industrial user base and a wide range of options to support multiple document views and document architectures, hyperlinks, non-Latin writing systems, and extensive automation and markup minimization. Although it is very powerful, is also very large and complex.
The Extensible Markup Language is a cut-down version, abbreviated for use on the Web by removing all the optional features of SGML to make it easier to use and to write programs for. But XML retains the extensibility of SGML, so you can do almost everything in XML that you can in SGML, but without the overhead of supporting the more complex and rarely-used features.
See our Links page for a list of useful resources and further information.
Cork, Ireland
info@silmaril.ie