On Jun 6, 2006, at 9:06 AM, Bullard, Claude L ((Len)) wrote:

> And in IDEAS/IADS (Unisys/USAMICOM) that supported dtd-less stylesheet
> based coding.

I forgot about IADS, but yet, that too. FWIW. EBT's DynaText did not  
require DTD's (but could take advantage of them), and I think  
SoftQuad could be used without them too. In all cases, the subset was  
similar to XML, and in (I believe) all cases, the stylesheets were  
more powerful than CSS in that they could also define hypermedia  
behaviour.

> IDEAS was the commercial version of IADS with DTD batch
> support as-needed.  IADS was offered free to the world and provided an
> example for Yuri and Dr. Goldfarb that the techniques for markup that
> would become XML did work in hypermedia.

Don't forget Steve DeRose and DynaText, which I would personally  
argue was superior to SoftQuad.

> XML is outcome of many separate efforts to make SGML suitable for
> hypert

Yep, and led by people wanting more powerful capabilities than those  
offered by HTML etc. Even now many of the core benefits that were  
desired are missing in the WWW.

The fact is that anyone with a reasonable amount of SGML experience  
ended up using a core subset similar to XML. Ultimately there was  
little new in XML, because it was based on something with a fairly  
long history. Some things, like I18N and explicit DTD-less support  
were good additions.