What led to the creation of SGML?
Before SGML there was IBM’s GML not standardized. It was created in 1969 to solve what today we would call an application integration problem. I was trying to get three separate programs to work together to form a law office information system an editor, a formatter, and an information retrieval program. I hit on generalized markup as the means to let them share data. With Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie, I developed that idea into GML. I continued research on document structures and created additional concepts, notably the validating parser in 1974. At that point, SGML was born, although it took another decade before it was fully developed and standardized. What would you have done differently? I’d have documented it better, especially the use of notations for strong datatyping and the relationship between documents and data. How will we reach the goal of truly separating presentation from data? We’ve seen it happen in most applications of XML because XML is used chiefly for data interchange
