XML is ASCII for the 21st century
- ASCII (ISO 646) solved a fundamental interchange
problem for flat text documents
- What bits encode what characters
- (For a pretty parochial
definition of 'character')
- UNICODE/ISO 10646 extends that solution to the whole
world
- XML thought it was doing the same for simple
tree-structured documents
- The emphasis in the XML design was on simplifying SGML
to move it to the Web
- XML didn't touch SGML's architectural vision
- flexible
linearisation/transfer syntax
- for tree-structured
prose documents with internal links
