Review Article

Beyond HTML: Markup Languages and the Future of Electronic Information

Toby Burrows
tburrows@library.uwa.edu.au

The number of books published about HTML and the World Wide Web is now quite staggering, as a visit to your local bookshop will readily confirm. More surprisingly, perhaps, these has been a sudden rush of publications devoted to the concepts and standards from which HTML derives, and particularly to SGML, the Standard Generalised Markup Language. At least a dozen major books about SGML have appeared in the last six months or so, and more can be expected in 1998. This is, after all, a very recherche field with only a handful of commercial titles published in the previous decade. Why the sudden surge of interest?