ABSTRACT
The first XML specification was formalized in 1998, although it began two years earlier among a working group of 11 members [XML 10a]. While coming from SGML, which had been around since the 1980s, XML was born as an answer to two problems, both of which were data related. Firstly, the rise of the Internet begged for a common interchange format that was good for just data and not data and layout (i.e., HTML). Second, programming languages were needing an alternative format to serialize objects in a human-readable form, which is commonly referred to as data binding. Fast-forward ten years to 2008, and you find that most business software had taken to XML quite well with common document formats being saved natively in XML. On the Internet, XML would be used almost everywhere under
the buzzword “AJAX” in most client/server web applications. Unfortunately, even now, game development tools haven’t quite made full use of XML.
