Marcin WicharyOnce in a while I imagine how much more pleasant HTML would be to type if only different brackets were originally chosen.
[div]
[p]
[a href=‘’][/a]
[/p]
[/div]
No single Shift press was necessary here.
Now curious exactly why SGML chose angle brackets! Would love to see a written statement. This is the closest I got to an answer, but it’s not really an answer.
This is from the standard, which I found online here: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub152.pdf
(That footnote is prescient.)
There are references to an 1980 draft, but wonder if that would be explained there. There probably also also working group notes…
Poring over SGML Handbook from Goldfarb himself (Goldfarb is the “G” in GML).
SGML had some wild features!
Very interesting! https://jtc1info.org/sd-2-history/jtc1-subcommittees/sc-34/
Not sure those are available online…
I sent some emails, but I am not sure if this is going to go anywhere. It’s wild that there isn’t an authoritative answer online, given how much of modern “online” uses HTML and angle brackets.
More from the same person writing about “chicken scratches.” Includes a tantalizing cover page of a working document.
https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol23/html/Mason01/BalisageVol23-Mason01.html
Still digging.
“To encourage acceptance, the authors of the SGML specification followed other design objectives: the ability to enter text and markup on "the millions of existing text entry devices"; no character set dependency; no national language bias; and markup usable by both humans and programs.”
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000465.shtml
Thanks to my emails but also people who were participating today, I got an email from one of the key players that sent me some great leads and info to investigate! (Including a PDF of the report I was salivating over earlier.)
It turns out the angle brackets are at most from 1979, if not earlier. More to research!
This is the earliest appearance of < > I know of today, from 1979.
This thread might slow down, as next step will be some interlibrary requests!
This might be more interesting. <P1> and <P2>! <#> for styling! Excited to dig and learn more.
They are *killing me*. In the old article about the history of it that I just discovered, they are using… square brackets.
Fired some interlibrary requests. Wish me luck!
Glenn Fleishman@mwichary Shift-Period/Comma Happens