W3C issues XML 1.0 spec. specification

MacWeek, Feb 16, 1998 by Andrea Dudrow

The World Wide Web Consortium last week released its official recommendation for the first specification of Extensible Markup Language.

Extensible Markup Language, or XML, is a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and is used to define and validate document formats on the Web (see 11.03.97, Page 1). The XML 1.0 recommendation was prepared by a group from the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. The W3C said XML is intended to meet the needs of media-independent publishing and Web document processing. XML, which the working group said is optimized for use as an Internet content delivery tool, is also expected to be used in metadata applications.

In addition, the W3C said programs that process XML are easy to assemble; many commercial and freeware tools already exist for this purpose.

The XML 1.0 recommendation is internationalized to support European and Asian languages and is also designed to promote vendor independence, user extensibility, complex structures, validation and human readability, the W3C said.

The specification is at www.w3.org.