2.2 A Brief History of XML

Should flashing text be a common HTML tag? This was a subject for debate in the early years of the World Wide Web. From its beginning in 1990, the markup language used to display pages on the World Wide Web was HTML. One reason for the success of HTML was its simplicity. It was a text format, and could be created using any simple text editor. During the 1990s, Microsoft and Netscape battled to create the best Web browser, and each side introduced new HTML features to provide a technological advantage over their rival. So tables, frames and other not-so-well-received ideas began to complicate HTML in advance of official standards. Potentially a Web page could make use of features as diverse as mathematical symbols, vector graphics or sound. An official HTML standard was necessary for Web browsers to interoperate, but incorporating all possible features into HTML would have made it huge and hard to comprehend [4]. It would also be difficult for Web browsers to comply fully with the standard. On the other hand, if HTML was kept small, then little improvement on a simple 'text and images' Web would be possible.

Eventually the rival companies agreed to a solution. Today, under the W3C standards group, HTML has been standardised around a common set of text and graphical features. New markup languages which contain specialised functionality are now created under a common syntax. This syntax is called XML, the Extensible Markup Language [5] ...