History of XML


Before discussing XML and what it can do for you, let's go back a few years and look into the history of XML. Back in 1986, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) standard. SGML is a meta-language that describes how to embed formatting commands inside of a document. It was purposely designed to be very general to provide maximum flexibility. However, this came at the price of a very complicated standard. As a result, it became a very powerful and complicated language ”in fact, one of my references stated that very few (if any) software packages were ever able to completely implement the SGML standard. SGML achieved some success in government and the aerospace industry and other business sectors that required an efficient method to organize thousands of pages of detailed technical documentation.

A successful byproduct of SGML (actually an application of it) is the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML is a markup language that has been widely adopted by web browsers, even though the language is limited. HTML is limited because it is comprised of a finite set of tags. The original version 1.0 of the HTML standard only supported about a dozen tags, while version 4.01 supports nearly a hundred tags. Although a hundred tags sounds like a lot, it isn't enough of a variety to support anything other than the creation of web pages. So, you will never see anyone use HTML as a format to exchange data. It will, however, continue to be used to display web pages until it is eventually phased out by XHTML.

Note

Additional information on XHTML can be found at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/.


Several individuals in 1996 started development of a new scaled down version of SGML that would remove the complicated and rarely used portions of the nearly 20-year-old SGML standard. The first draft of the XML standard, version 1.0, was released in February 1998 and users immediately saw the benefits of XML.



XML and Perl
XML and Perl
ISBN: 0735712891
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 145

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