[vangale]

One group that has always been chasing the "holy grail" of separation of content and presentation are big publishers. They want one content source that is controlled by "editors" and then the content can be rendered differently for the different avenues of publication. Maybe a transform of the content is sent to online databases like lexis/nexis or westlaw, or sent to printing press for a book, or sent to the web, or abstracts sent to a bibliography service, etc.

This is why SGML was big in the publishing industry before the web.

It's mostly achievable but there are clearly problem areas such as tables where sometimes the presentation is an integral part of the content.