XML@10: A Decade of XML

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) was developed at the W3C in a little under two years. The work was started in 1996, and the W3C Recommendation was published in its final (first edition) form in February of 1998. The work was started by Jon Bosak, had a working group of eleven people who met by telephone weekly, and a larger group of approximately two hundred industry experts who gave guidance on a mailing list.

When the work was started it seemd that we might be lucky if anyone every adopted it. it was called Web SGML, and was primarily aimed at complex technical documentation. But (as one might say today) the meme escaped, and within a year there was a lot of interest, and not only from the technical documentation community.

XML was designed to be a subset of SGML that could be easily manipulated by non-XML-aware software as much as possible. One use case we had was the “desparate Perl hacker” who was trying to make a change to perhaps tens of thousands of files in a short time. We did not dare to dream that Perl would ever support XML natively, and yet later in 1998 Larry Wall demonstrated the Perl programming language having native XML support. We expected to need a Web browser plugin like those of EBT and SoftQuad, but Netscape Navigator 5 supported XML natively (styled at that time with CSS) in 1998. I do not think any of us ever expected XML to be used in mobile telephones, or in motor car diagnostic systems, or in cameras and photocopiers, and yet today it is in all of those places.

This talk will explore some of the things that made XML so popular, the successes and the failures, will look ahead a little, and will invite speculation on XML’s twentieth birthday.

And you won’t have to sing a song or wear a special suit. Promise.