On Improving SGML

SUMMARY Several improvements are suggested to the syntax of SGML, the recent international standard for the description of electronic document types. These improvements ease processing by existing tools, remove ambiguity cleanly, and increase human usability. They also indicate some guidelines that should be followed in the design and specification of computersoftware standards. By following accepted computer-science conventions for the description of languages the design of a standard may be improved, and the subsequent implementation task simplified.