On Sun, 18 May 1997 14:28:01 -0400 Daniel Pitti said:
>The delivery of SGML encoded documents is most definitely a problem,
>though the future looks more promising now than it did a year ago.
>Changing the outlook is the development of XML or Extensible Markup
>Language, an IETF effort. XML is a subset of the SGML standard, a subset
>that eliminates some features that make it difficult to write SGML-aware
>applications.

Daniel is quite right that XML is an extremely promising development
for anyone who wants to deliver SGML on the net.

But the XML work is being done under the aegis of the World-Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), not the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  I
don't know that that makes much difference, but it has gradually become
clear to me that the W3C and the IETF are very different in some salient
ways.

For further information on XML, consult the XML activity page on the
W3C web server, at

   http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/SGML/Activity


-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
 ACH / ACL / ALLC Text Encoding Initiative
 University of Illinois at Chicago
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