| Another spin-off of the browser wars has been the desire by the software giants to merge the Web and the desktop. With the browser becoming more of an application as well as a surfing tool, it grew in size, complexity, glitz, and glamour. What was needed was a simple, back-to-basics method of data exchange. It is not necessary to change the Web browser paradigm, but it is necessary to create a parallel structure that can blend into the Web as needed or remain separate and still be fully viable. XML meets these needs as a markup for content and data containers or through transformation, with the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), into fully presentable Web documents. An XML document can be tailored to suit the needs of the data and the application that requires those data.
XML avoids many, if not all, of the pitfalls that HTML has experienced by staying true to its basic design goals of data markup, extensibility, and the openended ability to adapt to a wide variety of applications and their future needs. As the Web expands further into new protocols, such as the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Wireless Markup Language (WML), Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), and the like, XML and its successors will adapt and evolve to meet those needs.
The implementation of XML has remained true to the original premise and promise of XML, which was to provide a content-driven language derived from and compatible with SGML, to provide the tools for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and other data-driven applications for which HTML was lacking, to be platform-independent, and to be distributed over the Web but not limited to the Web browser. This has been accomplished by strictly requiring key components of SGML that were optional in HTML and setting out and adhering to very stringent guidelines in XML. |