The XML & SGML CookBook: Recipes for Structured Information

by Rick Jelliffe

Prentice Hall, 1998
ISBN 0-13-614223-0

Reviewed by Kasey Rios Asberry

This book is a detailed, comprehensive reference on SGML(Structured General Markup Language) and its subset XML(Extensible Markup Language). It is the most recent title in the Charles F Goldfarb series on Open Information Management. In the tradition of self-evidencing works (Edward Tufte, Invisioning Information) this effort exemplifies fine information design. It is a cookbook of biblical proportions organized as a continuum ranging from the structures of systems of documents, through document patterns down to the level of characters and glyphs. Each entry is deeply referenced by other authors' approaches to the same element. Jeliffe pays significant (gratifying) attention to the difficult area of East Asian characters and mapping. I found the appendices nearly as exciting as the text: together they provide an effective rosetta stone of special characters and their international standards definitions. Jeliffe explores the interaction of human communications and computation via the primary conceptual toolkit of the designer: pattern language and structural comparison.

Those engaged in information systems design may find these Recipes for Structured Information both practical and poetic. It is rather rare for me to find myself immersed in a technical work so that I can't wait to turn the page. The XML & SGML CookBook answers so many of the fundamental questions posed by the movement to implement the web as truly World Wide that my spirits were lifted in reading it --- for the first time in several years this doesn't seem so much of an impossible dream.