Tim Bray and his colleagues in the World Wide Web Consortium had a very specific mission when they set out to define a new standard seven years ago. They needed a new format for Internet-connected systems to exchange data, a task being handled with increasing awkwardness by HyperText Markup Language.
The solution Bray helped concoct was XML (Extensible Markup Language), which has since become one of the building blocks of information technology and today serves as the basic language for disparate computing systems to exchange data. Microsoft is betting heavily on XML-based technology that will turn the new version of Office into a conduit for viewing and exchanging data from backend systems. The biggest players in technology are betting heavily on Web services based on XML. And corporate giants such as Wal-Mart Stores are relying on XML to streamline their business processes.
Bray has since gone on to address another big challenge -- the visual representation of data -- with his company, Antartica, which sells tools that display information from Web searches, corporate portals and other sources in an intuitive map-based format.
Bray talked about the spread of XML, challenges in search technology and other concerns with ZDNet UK's sister site CNET News.com.
Q: What was the intent in creating XML?
A: This was 1996, and the Web was already wildly popular beyond anybody's dreams. And it was pretty clear that, while there were a lot of really good things about the Web architecture, there was a severe barrier to extending it beyond presenting information to people.
They were already talking about doing micro payments in e-commerce and collaborative activities of various kinds, and it was for this we needed to be able to make it machine-to-machine. It was also the case that the authoring for the Web was getting more and more industrial, and it was starting to look more and more like conventional publishing. You needed to do a lot of repurposing and syndication and stuff.
And you thought HTML wasn't going to be sufficient?
It was pretty clear that HTML didn't provide a very good answer for any of these things. HTML was and is outstanding as a means of delivering information to people. But as a means of communicating machine-to-machine, it suffered. It suffered, because there was a tradition of laxity. It suffered, because it came with a set of hardware tags, and you couldn't make your own. And there was this thing called SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), which had been around for decades and seemed to have a lot of the missing pieces for what people wanted to do on the Web.
The number of people who'd been involved in the SGML world and had real exposure to the Web was really small, and essentially all of them got together and formed a working group under the leadership of (W3C leader) John Bozak, and the idea was simply to provide something you could use for industrial publishing -- what we would now call business-to-business on the Web.
