>Is anybody working on creating an abstration for preserving formatting
>information inside or along with SGML documents, in cases where format
>really is part_of the information. Two examples where such an approach
>might make sense could be:
>
> Examples:
> 1) K-12 textbooks
Pardon my ignorance: what is K-12?
> 2) Printed survey forms for large market research firms.
The Taiwanese have worked on this problem. They have the particular
problem that the only official version of a document is the paper one
physically stamped by the boss, so there is a great need to maintain
various kinds of page fidelity.
When I last heard, they were trialing a twin DTD system. One was a forms
design DTD: it basically had lines, boxes, constant text, and
named fields. That sets the boilerplate. Then there was
a database DTD in which the actual field data is given. The two
get linked by simple name referencing.
Rick Jelliffe