The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), was adopted as ISO 8879 in 1986 as the ISO standard for text encoding. Since its introduction 13 years ago, SGML is being used by an ever-increasing number of organizations to assist in the creation, management, storage, and delivery of their information products.

Today there are a minimum of 16 manufacturing, telecommunications, airline, railway, department of defense, automotive, heavy trucking, computer systems, electronics, pharmaceuticals, newspapers, medical, legal, multimedia entertainment, and commercial publishing cross-industry groups building SGML applications.

Each group is made up of dozens of companies, from across the world.

but SGML is much more...

SGML is quite sophisticated. It was designed to allow the exchange of information on any level of complexity among software, hardware, storage and presentations across all products. SGML provides the ability to separate the coding of information for presentation from the coding of data content and structure. SGML facilitates data exchange among diverse systems. As a standard, SGML goes far beyond the goal of information interchange; SGML enables us to add value to the information. It enables us to control, retrieve, and reuse and information. It reduces dependence on software and hardware systems that require proprietary data formats. And SGML is the key to the development of multi-media products because it enables us to integrate data in multiple formats into a single, seamless representation.

According to Rick Jelliffee in the book "The XML & SGML Cookbook", SGML was developed to support "large, long-term document publishing." XML, on the other hand, provides for coding "efficient, small, short-term documents." Jelliffee recommends the full SGML solution when documents are large or complicated, come from multiple sources, must be rigidly defined, or when you to need to search information like a database yet publish like free text.