An International Standards Organization standard (ISO 8879) for identifying and coding the various elements of a document, such as titles, sub-titles, headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, tables, etc. SGML, supported by the American Association of Publishers, is used to mark text for a variety of purposes, including typesetting and types of electronic publishing. In an SGML document, data is stored in a generic text format (ASCII text), allowing it to run on virtually any operating system, and the codes are linked to the original document according to a user-defined structure, which is stored as a code or character set called a document type definition. Originally designed solely for the UNIX platform, SGML has increased in popularity to such an exent that many word processing and page layout programs now incorporate SGML features. SGML is also used for information retrieval from databases, and designing World Wide Web pages as well.
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