Livin' the life...

"2008-02-12: Ten years ago, on 10 February 1998, W3C published Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation. W3C is marking the ten-year anniversary of XML by celebrating "XML10" and extending thanks to the dedicated communities -- including people who have participated in W3C's XML groups and mailing lists, the SGML community, and xml-dev -- whose efforts have created a successful family of technologies based on the solid XML 1.0 foundation. The success of XML is a strong indicator of how dedicated individuals, working within the W3C Process, can engage with a larger community to produce industry-changing results. "Today we celebrate the success of open standards in preserving Web data from proprietary ownership," said Jon Bosak, who led the W3C Working Group that produced XML 1.0." (Ref)

Congrats! To consider it for only a moment, the amount of 'languages' and specifications that are based on, and associated with XML these days (RSS, Atom, SOAP, XACML, ebXML to name a few) is nothing short of astounding. And to think that XML's not done there either, as it also seems a key component in the realisation of the Semantic Web dream! This definitely has been one of the greatest "giant" steps in technology specs for a while!