A Brief History of XML

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To help you understand what XML is, let's first look at how it came about. The following sections trace a brief history of how XML developed.

GML

Generalized Markup Language (GML) was created by Charles Goldfarb, Ed Mosher, and Ray Lorie at IBM in 1969. GML (it was also known within IBM as Text Description Language [TDL]) was one of the first markup languages. Its purpose was to allow a document's form (its structure) and its content to be separated.

SGML

By 1978, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) wanted to create a standards-based markup language based on GML. In 1986, this standard was agreed on, and it was called Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

HTML

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN scientist, borrowed from SGML for his latest project ”a hypertext idea. He combined the tag-based approach of SGML with typesetters' style sheets and hyperlinking to create a new markup language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

XML

HTML grew in popularity and served its purpose well, but it was decided that its tag set was too limited. Switching back to SGML was not a good idea, because it was too complex for the web. In 1994,Tim Berners-Lee set up a new standards body at MIT called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In 1996, a new working group at the W3C was formed to create a simple version of SGML (called within the group "SGML for the web") that, like HTML, could be used on the web. They called it Extensible Markup Language (XML). In 1998, the XML specification was agreed on, and XML officially became a W3C standard.

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