hen I first began to write on the subject of XML in early 1997, HTML was the rage and Web developers were demanding features to enhance Web sites. Eager to please, and to gain mind share in the process, browser vendors Netscape and Microsoft extended HTML with new features at an almost frenetic pace. Unable to the keep the static features of the HTML standard up to date, the W3C toyed with the idea of a simplified "SGML for the Web" that would allow anyone to extend the language without breaking the standard. They would later dub this new language, XML.

   In my "Beyond HTML" column and my later "XML At Large" column, you will see this evolution of XML as an extensible language that could be rendered within a browser, to a server-side solution that could be used to represent any kind of a data. When combined with the emerging XSL transformation language, this data could be converted, or "transformed," into virtually any format desired. XML has since become the common link as a data representation language. Wherever there is data, there is an opportunity to use XML to describe it.