THE XML REVOLUTION - TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Original motivation for HTML

Exchange data on the Internet:

documents are published by servers
documents are presented by clients (browsers)

HTML was created by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau at CERN in 1991:

the motivation was to keep track of experimental data

HTML describes only the logical structure of documents:

browsers are free to interpret markup tags as they please
the document even makes sense if the tags are ignored

HTML combined well-known ideas:

hyper-text was known since 1945
markup languages date back to 1970

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