Quick Design Process

This goal was motivated largely by fear. We perceived that many of the Net's powers-that-be did not share our desire for widespread use of open, nonproprietary, textual data formats. We believed that if we didn't toss XML's hat into the ring soon, the Web's obvious need for extensibility would be met by some combination of binary gibberish and proprietary kludges.

Back-link to spec

Copyright © 1998, Tim Bray. All rights reserved.