After SGML: What comes next?

SGML has been an ISO standard for ten years now It was being adopted and implemented even before the final standard was published, and its user community is now very large, with thousands of applications. But is SGML a standard for all times? SGML has always faced competition from systems that now are largely forgotten. Only three years ago, a distinguished consultant proclaimed that WYSIWYG was dying. Will SGML be able to continue ifs record of success in the face of HTML (you mean that's not SGML?), PDF, OpenDoc, OLE, and the surprising continued vitality of proprietary systems? SGML has been a remarkably stable standard in the past decade, but will it remain so in the next? Fashions in computing and data management have changed in the years since the development of SGML was begun. In the past year, GCA's conferences have devoted an increasing amount of time to HyTime and DSSSL, new standards that may offer foreshadowings of changes to SGML itself. Perhaps the next year will bring us the long-awaited revision of the base standard. Will SGML still be SGML? There may be no one answer for these questions. As users and proponents of SGML, we need to fake a hard look at our requirements and define what we need from the standard and its implementers. more significantly, we need to understand what information is and what we expect it to do for us. Only with that understanding can we devise good SGML applications, make the right requests from vendors, make the right links between SGML data and other kinds of information-or design a good replacement for SGML.