XML: An Introduction - Brief History

Goldfarb invented the term “mark-up language”  to make better use of the initials and it became the Standard Generalised Markup Language .

In 1986 , SGML was adopted by the ISO .

SGML is just a specification for defining markup languages.

SGML (Standardized Generalized Markup Language) is the mother of all markup languages like HTML, XML, XHTML, WML etc...

 In 1986, SGML became an international standard for defining the markup languages. It was used to create other languages, including HTML, which is very popular for its use on the web. HTML was made by Tim Berners Lee in 1991.

While on one hand SGML is very effective but complex, on the other, HTML is very easy, but limited to a fixed set of tags. This situation raised the need for a language that was as effective as SGML and at the same time as simple as HTML. This gap has now been filled by XML.

The development of XML started in 1996 at Sun Microsystems.  Jon Bosak with his team  began work on a project for remoulding  SGML. They took the best of SGML and produced something to be powerful, but much simpler to use.

The World Wide Web Consortium also contributes to the creation and development of the standard for XML. The specifications for XML were laid down in just 26 pages, compared to the 500+ page specification that define SGML.