We seem to be getting to the stage of finally having several credible candidates for language class that can cope with SGML-family systems.

Now by now you may be saying Rick, are you really saying that SGML can only be described by some kind of seven-level grammar? Zut alors! And HTML and XML too?

Here is Melvin Conway’s foundation point from his 1963 paper defining coroutines:
“That property of the design which makes it amenable to many segment configurations is its separability.”

I found that that an interesting section Ken Krechemer had contributed to the Wikipedia article on the Standardization of OOXML had been deleted for being an editorial. Anyway, I hope Ken doesn’t mind me taking the liberty of reprinting it here.

I loathe making documents with numbered headings or any kind of definite design in Word Processors. I find numbered headings and lists annoying in Word at best, maddening in Open Office at worst, so I have been using AbiWord today. If you want to take a design-driven approach, then most Word Processors just suck. AbiWord is a non-nonsense, calm-feeling free WP not targeted at very large documents. It has a native XML format pretty simple for transformations into and out of, and basic ODF and OOXML import/export.

But it is no use me sitting here complaining that people are saying “drop SGML” without even knowing what it is they are dropping. So I thought I’d make some little diagrams roughly scoping a basic machine for SGML family parsers.

A counter-reformation rather than a reformation? But welcome none-the-less.

In the late 1980s, RAM cost about 10^⁵ per dollar, and in the early 1990s it was cheaper but still fairly flat. But a big price fall started in about 1996, so that by 2000 RAM was about 10^⁷ per dollar.

There are a number of ways in which text can be introduced, changed or disappeared, though each format will have a different mix of possibilities.

Here is a better overview of the i4i patent.