XML is ASCII for the 21st century
ASCII (ISO 646) solved a fundamental interchange problem for flat text documents
- What bits encode what characters
- (For a pretty parochial definition of 'character')
UNICODE/ISO 10646 extends that solution to the whole world
XML thought it was doing the same for simple tree-structured documents
- The emphasis in the XML design was on simplifying SGML to move it to the Web
- XML didn't touch SGML's architectural vision
- flexible linearisation/transfer syntax
- for tree-structured documents with internal links