And in IDEAS/IADS (Unisys/USAMICOM) that supported dtd-less stylesheet
based coding. IDEAS was the commercial version of IADS with DTD batch
support as-needed.  IADS was offered free to the world and provided an
example for Yuri and Dr. Goldfarb that the techniques for markup that
would become XML did work in hypermedia.  It was presented at the CALS
and SGML conferences.   IADS came the closest to XML because it's
developers made a very noticeable break with SGML conformance by
embracing syntax-conformance without DTDs.  It was beat up for that at
the time, but with XML's success, it became evident the Unisys
programmers had gotten it all right some six years before XML.  

XML is outcome of many separate efforts to make SGML suitable for
hypertext.  There are Rashomonic viewpoints about the history depending
on which projects one worked at the time, but collectively, almost all
of XML features had been tried prior to the working groups beginning at
the W3C.  Yuri had the benefit of seeing these so there was no doubt
about the technical outcome, just the rate of adoption.  Some were
surprised the uptake was so fast; others weren't.  The piles of money
being lobbed at web companies at that point provided a mighty suction
and the shortcomings of HTML-centric browsers were becoming evident to
those who had not already been exposed to more advanced systems.

len


From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@r...] 

On Jun 5, 2006, at 4:38 PM, Bullard, Claude L ((Len)) wrote:

> 1.  90% of the work was done before the work started because of the 
> long history of SGML.
>
> 2.  There was no lack of expertise with years of experience.

I think these were two key points. The requirement for SGML
compatibility, plus the expertise from the field that guided SGML
feature selection, resulted in broad consensus. There were already a
number of XML-like subsets out in the wild, and in particular, in 2
commercial browser-like applications (SoftQuad and EBT).

BTW. I should note that the ERB/WG split happened after the group got
big enough to justify the split. There was a lot of formative work done
before the ERB split off.