DaveNet: Friday, August 15, 1997; by Dave Winer.

News from Microsoft on XML

From Tom Johnston, tomj@microsoft.com, and Cornelius Willis, cwillis@microsoft.com:

Yesterday afternoon, after our announcement with Marimba had already hit the wire, the W3C sent us notice that they've accepted the OSD submission from Microsoft and Marimba. The W3C contact is Sally Khudairi, khudairi@w3.org.

The announcement also sparked a lot of interest in the emerging XML standard. XML is the universal language for describing data on the Internet. XML will provide the means for players in different roles to communicate (e.g. Doctors and Pharmacists, Vendors and Buyers, etc.). It complements HTML, and provides 3 key benefits -- extensibility, structure and validation.

We're excited about XML and its future applications. We're shipping a generalized XML parser in Internet Explorer 4.0, and also provide source code for this parser free of charge . Other firms are already using this parser to enable new XML-based applications, and it's accessible from any scripting language or tool. Here is the link to our XML page:

http://www.microsoft.com/standards/xml/