Every now and then, an idea comes along that in retrospect seems just so simple and obvious that everyone wonders why it hadn’t been seen all along. Often when that happens, it turns out that the idea isn’t really all that new after all. The Java revolution began by drawing on ideas from generations of programming languages that came before it. XML—the Extensible Markup Language—does for content what Java did for programming: draws on some old ideas and uses them to provide a portable way to describe data.
XML is a simple, common format for representing structured information as text. The concept of XML follows the success of HTML as a universal document presentation format and generalizes it to handle any kind of data. In the process, XML has not only recast HTML, but has transformed the way many businesses think about their information. In the context of a world driven more and more by documents and data exchange, XML is an important foundation technology.
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