SGMLstyle

SGMLstyle is a documented approach to authoring SGML documents that emphasizes consistency, modularity, and portability. It specifies conventions for element and attribute naming, document structure, and DTD design to make SGML content predictable for processors and suitable for long-term interchange. It also promotes separating content from presentation and reusing content models.

Origin and scope: Developed within SGML user communities in the 1990s as a pragmatic set of best practices, SGMLstyle is not a formal standard but a collection of guidelines that can be adopted or adapted by organizations to improve interoperability across SGML processors and workflows.

Key principles: clear hierarchies for logical structure (metadata, body, references), consistent attribute usage, modular DTDs with parameter entities, and explicit content models. It favors documented constraints, the use of entities for recurring terms, and validation practices that ensure documents conform to agreed models.

Typical applications: technical manuals, standards documents, bibliographic records, and other long-lived content that requires reliable interchange. SGMLstyle guides how to model information so that tools can extract, transform, or render content without relying on presentation-specific markup.

Relationship to related technologies: while largely superseded by XML in many contexts, SGMLstyle concepts influenced later markup practices and document-processing pipelines, and remain relevant in legacy SGML repositories and in communities that maintain TEI- or standards-driven documentation within SGML.