Well, I haven't had much time to do any more work on this document, so I'm going to drop a quick note in lieu of leaving it updated, until I can find more time to write more useful information.
I've been concentrating on jade, as I'm starting to get a feel for DSSSL. Another reason I'm working with jade is because of XML and XS, which I'd like to be wildly successful. For one thing, after having written most of an XML parser and proving myself it could be done <cough>, I started using Textuality's Lark XML parser in many of my applets as a general complex argument adaptor, and it is working out well. I'm in the process of evaluating whether I can write a set of Java XS beans in what little free time I have, for the ultimate goal of building a small, but hopefully healthy, web layout tool.
My experience has been that it is often more work to use SGML than not, but I'm hoping that with the combined efforts of the internet community this will change. There are a lot of good people out there writing the infrastructure for a very useful documenting environment.
This is where I'm going to put a bunch of references to SGML related materials. Right now the only thing here is a link to a review of some public domain SGML utilities. This document was written using Emacs and processed with an SGML tool. For a first document, I'm fairly pleased; enough, at least, to have begun to convert many of my other documents to SGML. Most notably is the documentation to jDB. When I have progressed a bit on that, I will place a link to it and give you my thoughts on the development process.
What concerns me most right now is the apparant lack of ready-to-use SGML tools. PD tools, that is. While I eventually do end up buying/using commercial products, I tend to avoid using systems which have no PD equivalent. One reason is because I like to be able to access my documents from anywhere, and commercial tools tend to be targetted for one, maybe two, platforms. If I can't install it myself, I don't want to have to rely on it. That aside, although there are several PD SGML processing packages, only one of them is usable "out of the box", and that one requires such infrastructure to use that I don't (use it). Right now I'm in the process of wading through the DSSSL specification so that I can write my own style specifications so that I can actually write non-trivial documents. <sigh>