As you upgrade from matchbox cars to real cars, you usually also
expand the parking requirements.  I'm continually amazed at the
people who complain that they can't get their new Porsche's into
their existing matchboxes.
 
We are, I believe, trying to encompass vastly greater needs with
SGML and the Text Encoding Initiative than what can ever be expected
to be done in deficient products like WordPerfect, Word or line-based
utilities.  A new generation of software has to be designed.  We're
not going to get there if we insist on 100% backward compatibility.
 
Lest we forget, SGML contains a vast array of minimization tools,
which may be employed to encode a lot of text without altering it
at all!  This is going to help a lot of people accept SGML in the
interim before we get software worthy of SGML's power launched.
 
[Erik Naggum
Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway