Somé practical aspects of the digitisation process: SGML and XML

Abstract

In the rapidly developing world of online Communications and digitisation, the portability of information and data is becoming more and more impor-tant. Users of various devices, such as personal computers, laptops, smartphones and PDAs run-ning different operating systems and browsers are increasingly requesting the possibility of accessing digitised documents in diverse formats. However, finding a timely, efficient and long term solution to this demand is not a simple task. Many people who are enthusiastically involved in digitisation are not even familiar with the differences in data storage and display formats, consequently they are insist-ing on pdf or html to be used for archiving, despite that these formats were originally conceived for the displaying of data. What can be the universal "wonderformat"? Although to-date, there is no global authoritative archiving standard in use, the SGML formát as well as XML, a simple and flexible version of SGML, developed by the W3C, are proving to be the most efficient solutions from the point of view of data structuring. These standards, applied together with DTD, XML SCHEMA, XSL and CSS technologies make it possible to display data in various formats, bringing closer a diverse and harmonious digital world.