SP - Features Summary

# SP

### A free, object-oriented toolkit for SGML parsing and entity management

## Features summary

- Includes nsgmls
  - Compatible with sgmls
  - Also generates RAST (ISO/IEC 13673)
- Provides access to all information about SGML document
  - Access to DTD and SGML declaration as well as document instance
  - Access to markup as well as abstract document
  - Sufficient to recreate character-for-character identical copy of any SGML document
- Supports almost all optional SGML features
  - Arbitrary concrete syntaxes
  - SHORTTAG, OMITTAG, RANK
  - SUBDOC
  - LINK (SIMPLE, IMPLICIT and EXPLICIT)
  - Only DATATAG and CONCUR not supported
- Sophisticated entity manager
  - Supports ISO/IEC 10744 Formal System Identifiers
  - Supports SGML Open catalogs
  - Supports WWW
  - Can be used independently of parser
- Supports multi-byte character sets
  - Parser can use 16-bit characters internally
  - 16-bit characters can be used in tag names and other markup
  - Supports ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode) using both UCS-2 and UTF-8
  - Supports Japanese character sets (Shift-JIS, EUC)
- Object-oriented
- Written in C++ from scratch
  - Not a modified version of a parser originally written in C
  - Reentrant
  - Sophisticated architecture
- Fast
  - Up to twice as fast as sgmls on large documents
- Portable
  - All major Unix variants
  - MS-DOS
  - Win32: Windows 95/Windows NT
  - OS/2
- Production quality
  - Version 1.0 recently released, after a year of test releases
  - Tested using several SGML test suites
  - Already used in several new commercial products
  - Written by James Clark, previously responsible for turning arcsgml into sgmls
- Free
  - Includes source code
  - No restrictions on commercial use
- Disadvantages
  - Programmer-level documentation only for generic API and not for native API.