XML history

Here are some historical landmarks in the evolution of XML:

1960s

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense begins a project to see whether widely separated computers could be linked together. The resulting computer network is called ARPANET. The name of the net gradually evolves into the Internet.

1970s

Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie at IBM invent the Generalized Markup Language (GML).

1986

GML develops into Standard GML (SGML), an ISO standard.

1989

Tim Berners-Lee proposes the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the most successful SGML application. The original motivation of HTML was to keep track of experimental data at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

1996

Jon Bosak, Tim Bray, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, James Clark, and several others begin work on a lite version of SGML that retains most of its power while trimming a lot of useless features.

1998

XML 1.0 becomes a standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international consortium leaded by Tim Berners-Lee that produces technical specifications for web technologies.

The XML data model is also closely related to the hierarchical data model, which was quite popular during the 1960s before the advent of the relational data model.