Last week I had the pleasure of meeting up with Jean Paoli of Microsoft. In November, Jean was presented with the XML Cup 2004 to recognise his lifelong work in XML and its precursor SGML. The meeting gave me an opportunity to hear about the fascinating history of XML and understand some of its importance to Microsoft and the industry. Jean Paoli was one of the leading members of the original XML working party and he had been working with SGML since 1985. SGML was a mark-up language that was mainly designed to allow manufacturers to pass complex design documents around. It worked very well at that task but never found its way into the mainstream of computing. Its biggest problem was its size, the specification was about a thousand pages and there was only one parser that implemented the complete standard. The other problem was that it was document centric, rather than data centric.
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