> XML predates the web because, as wikipedia puts it:
> > XML is an application profile of SGML (ISO 8879
That doesn't mean it predates the web... HTML is an application profile of SGML, too, so by your argument HTML predates the web (as it would have to, if XML did, not only for that reason, but because factually HTML predates XML) and is not web technology. This, of course, is silly.
XML was consciously modelled on HTML but generalized for arbitrary data. It is very much web, or at least web-inspired, technology.
SGML -> HTML -> world decides HTML is too limited -> XML
All are the progeny of SGML; HTML is "novel" because of how limited it was; by opening up the scope of XML to more or less all of SGML, it is much less "of the web" than HTML was.
I was working with and paying attention to markup schemes and languages from the mid-80s. At the time XML emerged, I remember a giant collective yawn from that side of the software world, precisely because it just seemed that W3C had decided to embrace-but-not-really-extend SGML.
But the order you recite to support this description is the same order as in my description you are responding to. What does “backwards” mean to you?
> by opening up the scope of XML to more or less all of SGML,
it is much less "of the web" than HTML was.
It's true that XML covers about the entire semantic space of SGML, but it deliberately does so with a much smaller syntactic space, inspired largely by HTML in its approach.
To say it wasn't “of the web” ignores the history of inspiration, development, standardization, and use.
> I was working with and paying attention to markup schemes and languages from the mid-80s. At the time XML emerged, I remember a giant collective yawn from that side of the software world, precisely because it just seemed that W3C had decided to embrace-but-not-really-extend SGML.
Yeah, and like the famous Slashdot CmdrTaco response to the iPod (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”), that response missed what was relevant in the real world completely, XML (as bad a reputation for heavyweight implementations as it has compared to some more modern data representations), while in principal an application of SGML is much lighter weight to implement tooling for and a much smaller conceptual space for humans to understand (traits it shared with its inspiration, HTML.)
Progress isn't always by extension, it's often by recognizing and eliminating what is superfluous to requirements.
“It seems that perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Don't get me wrong. I am a huge fan of XML and use it extensively with my own non-browser-platform software. It has indeed turned out to be far more consequential than SGML.
But how of much has anything to do with the use of XML on the web ? I'd argue not much at all. XML's real success has been as one of the first data formats that could really be used to represent more or less anything at all, and very quickly had excellent parser implementations for all the languages that mattered.
The entire "impact" consisted of the significance that Apple is getting into that space: a company with a powerful brand backed by a history of delivering popular consumer tech. I'm sure that wasn't lost on Malda; but his remarks at the moment were about the specs (the what, not the who). There was no reason for a non-Apple-fanatic to get that iPod.
> > XML is an application profile of SGML (ISO 8879
That doesn't mean it predates the web... HTML is an application profile of SGML, too, so by your argument HTML predates the web (as it would have to, if XML did, not only for that reason, but because factually HTML predates XML) and is not web technology. This, of course, is silly.
XML was consciously modelled on HTML but generalized for arbitrary data. It is very much web, or at least web-inspired, technology.