Creation of XML

XML, or Extensible Markup Language, became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation in February 1998. It is a simplified descendant of SGML, the older standard for marking up documents, and it was developed by a working group that included Jon Bosak and Tim Bray. XML lets people define their own tags to describe the structure of data in a plain-text format that both people and software can read. It quickly became a common format for exchanging information between systems, and it underlies many other formats, including XHTML, RSS, the SVG graphics format and the file formats used by office software. In later years lighter formats such as JSON took over many data exchange tasks on the web, but XML remains widely used.

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