Why Use SGML?
The use of SGML markup on dissertations allows far more complex searching. For fully marked up documents, searches can be made on bibliographic citations or such citations could be extracted from each dissertation to create a citation database as a secondary product. Because the whole dissertation would be online, it could be searched and retrieved, rather than searching and retrieving only the limited document surrogate (title and abstract), then waiting for delivery of the complete dissertation. Logical divisions within the text can be marked up; this structure can be utilized for retrieval of these smaller portions of a document to reduce download time. SGML is also independent of platform, such that a single document can be shown successfully on any number of computers without conversion. It lacks the proprietary coding that makes word-processed documents difficult to transfer between applications and platforms. As Web technology improves, the raw SGML will become even more useful
