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1. Introduction

In 1986, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) became an international standard for the format of text and documents. SGML has withstood the test of time. Its popularity is rapidly increasing among organizations with large amounts of document data to create, manage, and distribute. However, various barriers exist to delivering SGML over the Web. These barriers include the lack of widely supported stylesheets, complex software because of SGMLs broad and powerful options, and obstacles to interchange of SGML data because of varying levels of SGML compliance among SGML software packages.
The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the pervasive data format for the World Wide Web. While HTML provides an outstanding mechanism to deliver simple documents over the Web, its simplicity imposes limitations that significantly raise the cost of deploying complex websites.
Because of the lack of SGML support in mainstream Web browsers, most applications that deliver SGML information over the Web convert the SGML to HTML. This down-translation removes much of the intelligence of the original SGML information. That lost intelligence virtually eliminates information flexibility and poses a significant barrier to reuse, interchange, and automation.
The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is being developed to enable delivery of SGML information over the Web while overcoming the limitations of HTML. The momentum building behind the XML effort means that XML is inevitably destined to become the mainstream technology for powering broadly functional and highly valuable business applications on the Internet, intranets, and extranets.

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