The 1997 Seybold Editors’ Awards: Recognizing Excellence in Publishing Technology

January 10, 1998

Seybold Report on Internet Publishing
Vol 2, No 5

Achievement of the Year: XML. The World Wide Web won one of our annual awards several years ago for bringing online publishing a graphical user interface for the masses. But its generic markup language, HTML, is too limited to take the Web into the future. This past year, a working group within the W3C, brought together by the leadership of Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems, created a simplified form of SGML called the Extensible Markup Language, or XML. With the initial XML specification complete and vendors lining up to support it, we salute the XML Working Group for creating a metalanguage that will enable text processing, searching and composition on the Web to rival that of other media. A year after our first positive assessment of XML, we reaffirm that this group is indeed taking Web markup where it needs to go, in the process creating a standard that will serve publishers of all types well into the future.