La necesidad de los estándares

Es curioso leer cómo Sun defiende el uso del software libre y de los estándares abiertos en las páginas de OpenOffice , donde presenta su nuevo formato basado en XML

open and free licensing guarantees that you are not at the mercy of a single company for improvements and fixes of the format or its supporting software, thus providing very strong protection for all investments and efforts you put into this format.

Continúa haciendo una relación de las ventajas de su nuevo formato

  1. Separation of Content, Layout, and Meta Information

  2. Standards Based

  3. Uniform Representation of Formatting and Layout Information

  4. Structured Format

  5. Idealized Format

  6. Common Format Across All Applications

  7. Open For Extensions and Supplemental Information

  8. Increased Robustness

  9. Document Archiving

  10. Version Interoperability

  11. Documented and Transparent File Content

Realmente la lectura de estas páginas es muy interesante y no tiene sentido replicarlas aquí.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0

En el principio fue SGML[12]. Sin SGML la web no existiría. XML es el hijo maduro de SGML.

Leemos en http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml

The «Extensible Markup Language (XML)» is a subset of SGML. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.

XML was developed by an XML Working Group (originally known as the SGML Editorial Review Board) formed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1996. It was chaired by Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems with the active participation of an XML Special Interest Group (previously known as the SGML Working Group) also organized by the W3C.

Otros miembros célebres del SIG eran James Clark y Norman Walsh.



[12] ISO 8879: Information processing - Text and office systems - Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) ”. Ginebra, 1986.