The document base can be setup with all the flexibility and benefits provided by SGML. But it is obvious, that the design of the DTDs determines the usability of the document base. In principle, as I see it, there are three classes of DTDs
Layout oriented
The focus of this DTD style is rendition, therefore the capabilities are mostly oriented to publishing tools. This kind of DTD cannot be used for data exchange between tools. This DTD style is not even appropriate to build the document base.
Presentation oriented
5. The document base in the MSR consortium The focus of this DTD style is the structure of the presentation layer but not rendering. So such DTDs allow to support various layouts on many different media. An example for this class of DTDs is DOCBOOK.DTD or MSRREP.DTD (). This sort of DTD is well suited for the document base if the required presentations reflect layout and global rearrangement. It is not really possible to extract information based on the content of the document, since the semantic of the DTD is oriented on the structure of a presentation rather than on the a data model of the presented subjects.
Database oriented
This class of DTDs is essential if data exchange is performed via the document base. The focus of such DTDs is a data model reflecting the reality of the objects in the process. This means, that the semantic of the DTDs reflect the details of the presented subjects. For example we have part instead of chapter or interface-prms instead of table .
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