XXX for XML on its Xth Birthday

Back in the good old Web 1.0 days, XML was really hot. Here's a useful reminder that (a) XML is 10 years old (gosh, doesn't time fly when you're having fun?) and (b) it's still hot.

Last month marked ten years since the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) on the Web Editorial Review Board publicly unveiled the first draft of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 at the SGML 96 conference. In November 1996, in the same hotel, Tim Bray threw the printed 27-page XML spec into the audience from the stage, from whence it fluttered lightly down; then, he said, "If that had been the SGML spec, it would have taken out the first three rows." The point was made. Although SGML remains in production to this day, as a couple of sessions reminded attendees, the markup community rapidly moved on to XML and never looked back.

Two areas stand out in this report on the conference: XQuery and Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Here's to the next X.