Today much information in organizations is stored electronically. Memos, notes, e-mail, technical manuals, legal contracts are just a few such documents. These documents are often stored on distributed servers, connected by networks to heterogenous multi- platform environments.

The process of accessing, transferring and manipulating electronic documents can be time-consuming and cumbersome due to myriad (and some cases proprietary) data storage and formatting schemes.

As documents become organized using hypertext links and with the addition of hypermedia, ways to operate on these documents becomes critical.

SGML is a an example of this concept which allows text versions of files to be transmitted electronically. Text files are transmitted and then rendered by the receiver. Even Web HTML files are really just text files.

Adding "structure" to documents also facilitates operations on the documents. This includes actions such as searching, sorting, or any one of a myriad of operations to be performed on an electronic document..

Thus, Benefits of "adding structure" to electronic documents include:

Portability

Re-usability

Inter-system operability

Ease of storage and retrieval

Low distribution costs

Quick access

Ease of maintenance and updating

Longevity

Ease of organization and re-organization

Appearance easily changed

Problems associated with conversion to structured documents include:

High start-up costs

Huge initial time commitment

Two ways structure may added to electronic documents are: (1) using <meta> tags in HTML documents, or (2) describing such information in the fields of an SGML document.