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Yes. As one of the contributors to some of the DoD standards
for
SGML, I know what it is to be both victim and perp.
One
survivor of all of that despite the web and HTML is the
US
Army IADS system. It used concepts that were all
eventually rolled up into XML and was doing so by 1990.
That
is, it enabled a DTD but did not mandate one, instead,
relying on a user-configurable stylesheet system that mapped
the
rendering to the tags. It is still in use and being improved.
Even
earlier, the US Navy CASS ATI system based over the
now
defunct Mentor Context editor worked by enabling the authors to
create
tag/rendering libraries and scripting the workflow through
the
GUI. The end product was then indexed and bitmap
rendered.
Old
fashioned but of its day and successful. Both of these succeeded
because the user was considered to be intelligent and able
to
analyze their local requirements and apply them given
reasonable tools.
CASS
was 'of it's day'; IADS was ahead
of its
time but is still out there doing useful work. In both
cases,
heavy participation by the user community was
instrumental. And in both cases, many pre-existing
standards were blithely ignored because the standards
did
not meet mission requirements. Choose well and
wisely. In this day, choose something that will blend
well
and make sense to a public safety vendor consultant
working an RFP out with a local agency. Only that will
get
the attention of industry because only that comes
with $
attached.
Still,
optional encodings and vocabularies have value. It
enables those who need guidance to work from a reasonable
and
not abstract model. That is faster than requiring them
to
learn and experiment with rules. Both are needed in
this
time, I think.
len
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