For Authors and Document Editors Who Commonly Deal With Raw SGML

Abstract

If you are not using an SGML editor that understands and hides all the markup (say, showing tags as buttons or icons instead of as strings with pointy brackets), you will meet all the “syntax” details of SGML head-on: you’ll quickly need to learn just when “<” is part of a tag and when it’s part of your text data, and other rules. You use your knowledge of the rules to avoid outright syntax errors, but more importantly to avoid accidentally creating an SGML structure that is technically valid, but not at all what you intended. That is, if you type some punctuation in the wrong place you might think it represents a tag when it’s really data, or vice versa. If you’re using SGML’s minimization features, especially omittag, the parser may infer enough other tags to get the document back to validity —but they may not be the tags you meant.