XML Turns 5

GiMP writes "According to the World Wide Web Consortium, XML turns 5 years old today. XML is used by many programs as a generic container for data. Applications range from websites, to word processor documents, to video games. It seems like only yesterday it was only a working-draft."

Comments

Still a toddler...

[pmz]

This article is just another reminder how young XML and its associated standards are. No wonder most people are confused about it.

Whenever I look at the last ten to fifteen years of computing history, I am utterly amazed. Think about this: during the Gulf War, with all its high-tech-ness, the best PCs were 386s or low-end 486s, and the best Sun workstations were the lower-end SPARCstations (i.e., perhaps a 40MHz CPU, probably 30MHz).

Whenever I see people who are totally overwhelmed by the almost unbounded number of buzzwords, platforms, and dozens of ways to accomplish the same task, I try to remember that nearly everything we take for granted today was popularized in the last decade (often just in the last five years, like XML). There is a quote in the Solaris Internals book that says there were 3000 UNIX systems in 1982 (or 83). There are several orders of magnitude more systems today. No other time in human history have we had to cope with this sort of change in so short a time.