When was xml first used

The official SGML specification is over very technical pages. It covers many special cases and unlikely scenarios. It is so complex that almost no software has ever implemented it fully. Programs that implemented or relied on different subsets of SGML were often incompatible with each other. The special feature one program considered essential would be considered extraneous fluff and omitted by the next program. The result, in February of , was XML 1. It was used in domains ranging from legal court filings to hog farming.

However, XML 1. The next standard out of the gate was Namespaces in XML, an effort to allow markup from different XML applications to be used in the same document without conflicting. Thus a web page about books could have a title element that referred to the title of the page and title elements that referred to the title of a book, and the two would not conflict.

XSLT has become a general-purpose language for transforming one XML document into another, whether for web page display or some other purpose. As two original members of the XML Working Group, we have witnessed many changes, some good, some a little disconcerting. In our continuing seven year effort to define XML, it is a good time to reflect for a moment about the hopes which accompanied the development of XML, what has happened since, and what should happen next.

Before XML had a name, a team of twelve people came together for a simple reason and with modest expectations. We were all professionals with significant shared experience both with the World Wide Web and with using computers to process and manage information using SGML, the direct ancestor of XML.

The ten-year-old SGML made information reusable; its power was its ability to describe information in a way that was independent of the system it was intended to be used on. But SGML had its problems, it was difficult to learn, its acceptance was limited to documentation professionals, and it was very difficult to use SGML with the new medium known as the Web.

Our Working Group formed around the shared belief that the two technologies could be made to work together to make it easier to share and reuse information. Working under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium W3C , we began by agreeing upon ten goals which are still listed in the first chapter of the XML specification. The goal of bringing together the two powerful ideas of the Web and of descriptive markup energized our group and drove us to work evenings and meet by teleconference not only on Tuesday but also Saturday mornings.

Just as interchangeable parts drove the Industrial Age, reusable information powers the Information Age. Our shared experience with SGML had taught us that information becomes more valuable when it can be shared and reused. And the Web would let us share information with wider audiences than we ever imagined. Markup is information inserted into a document that computers use; in the case of SGML, markup takes the form of tags inserted into documents to mark their structure.

Descriptive markup uses markup to label the structure and other properties of information in a way that is independent of both the system it's created on and of the processing to be performed on it. Meta-languages are languages used to create vocabularies that are relevant to their information. User defined, processing-independent markup is easier to reuse and can be processed in new and often unexpected ways. In the mid s Sun Microsystems introduced Java, with the ability to applications securely on any supported platform.

One early use was to create applets, applications designed to run safely in web browsers. Rather, Java helped companies like IBM make sense of their diverse range of operating systems. Having each system running Java greatly simplifies the business of creating interoperable applications.

Another example is Oracle, which uses Java stored procedures as an ideal solution for its cross-platform database. The significance of XML to Microsoft is only now becoming clear, with the company describing its. Microsoft emphatically does not own XML, and the technology has transcended politics by virtue of its sheer usefulness.

The fact that XML is important to all three companies says a lot for its bridge-building potential. The mere fact of a document being in XML is no guarantee of usefulness. These are large documents with hundreds of Visio-specific elements and attributes. It might make it easier for other vendors to create an import filter; but the real benefit will come if and when Microsoft and other drawing application vendors sit down to thrash out an agreed XML standard for drawing documents.

With XML, standards are everything. It doesn't lend itself to use beyond the single application of web-page design. You would not use HTML to exchange data between incompatible databases or to send updated product catalogs to retailer sites, for example. HTML does web pages, and it does them very well, but it only does web pages. SGML was the obvious choice for other applications that took advantage of the Internet but were not simple web pages for humans to read.

The problem was that SGML is complicated--very, very complicated. The official SGML specification is over very technical pages. It covers many special cases and unlikely scenarios. It is so complex that almost no software has ever implemented it fully. Programs that implemented or relied on different subsets of SGML were often incompatible with each other.

The special feature one program considered essential would be considered extraneous fluff and omitted by the next program.