XML and the Second-Generation Web; May 1999; Scientific American
Magazine; by Bosak, Bray; 5 Page(s) Give people a few hints, and
they can figure out the rest. They can look at this page, see
some large type followed by blocks of small type and know that
they are looking at the start of a magazine article. They can
look at a list of groceries and see shopping instructions. They
can look at some rows of numbers and understand the state of
their bank account. Computers, of course, are not that smart;
they need to be told exactly what things are, how they are
related and how to deal with them. Extensible Markup Language
(XML for short) is a new language designed to do just that, to
make information self-describing. This simple-sounding change in
how computers communicate has the potential to extend the
Internet beyond information delivery to many other kinds of
human activity. Indeed, since XML was completed in early 1998 by
the World Wide Web Consortium (usually called the W3C), the
standard has spread like wil