On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 11:06:19AM -0500, David Lyon wrote:
> On Thursday 03 February 2005 06:26 pm, you wrote:
> > > I can see your point. I guess they chose the less and greater than
> > > characters because they look a bit smoother on the screen
> >
> > Screen? We're talking about the 1960s.
> 
> Are you saying xml is that old? I'd be interested any reading any
> links about xml in the sixties...

XML is a subset (more or less) or "profile" of an older ISO standard
called SGML.  This was published in 1986, after years of work.  The
earliest work with a publishing system within IBM certainly goes
back to the 1970s, and quite possibly the 60s. At that time,
there was no separation between the tag and the presentation --
it was closer to a fixed vocabulary like PARA, ITALIC, BOLD.

The GENCODE committee was tasked with coming up with a complete
list of such of tags for all publishing.  When it became clear
to them that this wasn't possible, they developed a system for 
letting people defining their own tags (SGML) and (published
much later) formatting them (DSSSL).   XML and XSL derive from
that work.

I wasn't involved with SGML development, and first used it in 1987.
But it was a smaller community of people then :-)

Draining the swamp, in my article, by the way, was a reference to
a paper Jim Gettys gave on using a common XML-based format for
configuration files, at Guadec a year or two ago.  I'd planned to
edit that article for xml-dev, but it got found first :-)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/