What this is all about

SGML is a powerful metalanguage for writing markup texts. Regardless of whether you plan to develop your own SGML applications or simply plan to use existing ones, a few software components are required to edit and publish SGML documents. SGML sources are not meant to be read by humans directly (except the authors, of course), and publishing just means to convert the sources into a human-readable form of any kind. Commercial solutions are available for Windows NT, but they are expensive. Most Linux distributions contain a variety of SGML-related tools (I use and recommend Debian, see the Debian SGMl/XML Howto). Fortunately, all important SGML tools are available in Windows versions too, and moreover, they are available for free somewhere on the web. This tutorial describes my own setup of an useful selection of SGML tools on a Windows NT 4.0 box.

XML is a somewhat simplified version of SGML and has received a great deal of attention in the web business. XML is less intended as a replacement for HTML, although modern browsers can display XML files. Instead it is well suited for the exchange of data through the net and as a means to create HTML from XML just in time, a process that would be too slow for SGML documents. As XML is essentially a subset of SGML (with a few caveats), many SGML applications can process XML documents as well. To make best use of your XML documents, this tutorial presents a selection of dedicated XML software as well.