Monday, November 27, 2006

The XML Decade

I found this article to celebrate XML decade on IBM site, and share with you the first paragraph here,
"XML is approaching 10 years old. How closely depends on how you're counting. The W3C Recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 was published on 10 February 1998. Work on XML started around 1996, however, rooted in almost thirty years of SGML. The design principles for XML, which guided its development were published on 25 August 1996. The first working draft, published on 14 November 1996 defined documents very similar to the majority of XML you might see today. Many of the changes between that first draft and the final recommendation were in more obscure areas of the standard. The basic idea of labeled, balanced, hierarchical tags and clearly defined text encoding were well in place in 1996, and so IBM Systems Journal accounts 2006 the year of XML's decade. Regardless of whether you agree with their counting, it is a volume well worth a thorough read by all XML professionals as it combines an interesting retrospective of XML with some useful articles discussing specific techniques and development, providing a glimpse into the future of the technology, and thus our profession. In this article I offer some comment and expansion on the treatment in IBM Systems Journal, focusing on the keynote article "Technical context and cultural consequences of XML" and one of the other contained papers, "Emerging patterns in the use of XML for information modeling in vertical industries". The latter paper is concerned with a common theme of Thinking XML--the development and adoption of industry-specific XML vocabularies. "

For the whole article, please refer to http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think38.html

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