Happy Birthday Xml

摘要

As anyone with kids-or a good memory-knows, when you cross the "double digits" birthday threshold, it's a big deal. This year, XML crossed this threshold on Feb. 10, and this got me thinking about questions that I might ask this 10-year-old in order to gain perspective on its past and future. I know I'm late, but XML is nothing if not flexible. It assured me that even a belated party is better than none, especially if I invited Alexander Falk, founder and CEO of Altova (its flagship product XML Spy is one of our favorites) and a real XML aficionado (www.xmlaficionado.com). I began with this: "XML, you're much more famous than your parent SGML, and your sibling HTML 4.01 was deprecated in favor of an XML standard, XHTML. Techies worldwide have heard about you, and mighty standards battles have been waged about you. However, growing is easy the first 10 years, but soon you'll have to be able to point to practical accomplishments. What have you been up to lately?" Confident as any precocious 10-year-old, XML replied: "First, I've inspired more than 38 core recommendations, everything from Canonical XML 1.1 to XQuery to XSL Transformations (XSLT), and many others. And, of course, the list of standards built on XML is enormous, including SOAP, DITA, and XBRL. And don't forget: The World Wide Web consortium fosters only the development of basic XML standards.