THDL Toolbox > THL Technologies & Open Standards > Technologies For Dummies > What is SGML?

What Is SGML?

Simple Introduction to SGML

SGML is an acronym for Standardized General Markup Language, which is an important markup language historically. It is used to encode texts for specific purposes. HTML - which is widely used to encode Web pages - is a subset of SGML concerned with formatting issues. SGML is far more powerful, and allows one to not just specify formatting, but also intellectually identify the nature of strings of texts. For example, SGML would allow one to say that a specific term is a place name, not just to specify that it should appear in italics, or with a blue color.

In the early 2000s, XML was created to address many of the limitations of SGML. With the birth of XML, SGML has rapidly declined in Humanities Computing and is no longer widely used. Please see XML for further details.

How is SGML being used in THDL?

We originally used SGML in the late 1990s for our original Tibetan literature cataloging, but we replaced it with XML subsequently and no longer utilize it.

How Can I Explore SGML Further?

See XML for further details.

Provided for unrestricted use by the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library