Xavier Leonard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > many web 2.0 technologies employ xml >> xml evolved from sgml >> > one Charles Goldfarb's main motivations for developing sgml was to > make books more accessible to people with visual disabilities.
If this information is accurate, I'd be very interested in having a quotable source for this... > a little more about this (very little, unfortunately) can be found in > this Goldfarb bio: http://www.sgmlsource.com/press/CGbioFull.htm Alas, this document does not contain the assertion about accessibilty work being one of the driving motivations in the development of SGML. (It only mentions making "more information accessible to people with reading disabilities" as an _effect_ of "the widespread deployment of markup languages".) Based on the interviews on the same site, I'm coming to the conclusion that while work on an SGML-based accessibility project turned out to be from Goldfarb's personal perspective "the most rewarding markup project" that he had ever been involved in [1], this application area was not in fact the original motivation for the development of GML and SGML. At least, when asked about the original motivations for these developments, he didn't mention accessibility aspects: In [2]: Q: Dr. Goldfarb, you led the project at IBM that invented SGML's precursor, GML. It's said that necessity is the mother of invention. What specific problem were you trying to solve? A: We were trying to do an automated law-office application. I had been a lawyer (in fact, I still am). Lawyers must do research on existing case law, decisions of court, and so on, to find out which ones are applicable to a given situation, find out what the previous legal rulings have been, and then merge that with text that the lawyer has written himself. Eventually, if it's, say, a brief for the court, [he must] then compose it and print it. At the time, which was 1969 or 1970, there weren't any systems available that did these three things. So in order to get the systems to share the data we had to come up with a way to represent it that was independent of any of those applications. In [3]: Q: How did you get started with SGML? A: After Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie and I completed our GML project, I decided to pursue some of the ideas further. I felt that a DTD could be created in a form that computers could read, and therefore be able to validate markup without actually processing the document. I proved it in 1974, so I consider that the start of SGML. Of course, it took another decade -- and hundreds of talented people -- to develop it into an International Standard. [1] http://www.sgmlsource.com/press/Losi.htm [2] http://www.sgmlsource.com/press/Floyd1.htm [3] http://www.sgmlsource.com/press/Kennedy.htm Greetings, Norbert -- Norbert Bollow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Informatics Management and Consulting for Adaptability and Benefit/Cost Optimization in Harmony with Human Rights and Needs _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@digitaldivide.net http://digitaldivide.net/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
