Here is a pieces of data marked up three ways:-
Version 1 : Purely Formatting Mindset (RTF)
"{\i Customer} Joe Bloggs \par"
Version 2 : SGML - Generic Markup
<p><i>Customer</i>Joe Bloggs</p>
Version 3 : SGML - Data Modelling
<Customer>Joe Bloggs</Customer>
I think for some poople, SGML is all about
Version 2 above. Entire books have been written that
use SGML to abstract the concepts of "paragraph",
"artwork" etc. from the typographic codes required to
achieve the result. (The DTD in Annex E of the handbook
is an example of this sort of mindeset).
Somewhere along the line, people started thinking
as in version 3 above. I have no idea when this
started to happen. Anyone out there know?
Sean Mc Grath
http://www.digitome.com/sean.htm
County Sligo, Ireland, Tel: +353 96 47391