XML is perhaps one of the Internet's greatest unrecognised success stories. The first draft of the XML standard dates back only to 1996, and was born out of an attempt to marry the simplicity of HTML with the power of Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML). It has rapidly moved centre-stage, to the point where most of the initiatives in the W3C A to Z list on its home page are based around XML - even HTML has been re-cast as XHTML. But XML is more than just an exercise in re-packaging. Since its creation, the scope of XML has widened enormously, and now encompasses a number of major ancillary projects that address deeper technical issues well beyond simply tagging data more intelligently - XML's starting point. For example, the eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) family - XSL Transformations (XSLT), XML Path Language (XPath) and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) - is concerned with the presentation side of XML documents: converting them into HTML for display in a browser is one obvious application.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:00 AM
