Happy Birthday XML « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger

I had no idea that Sunday marked the birthday for XML. I know that is very geeky to recognize such a date. By no means, am I a super geekly dude. I am more of a media geek. But, like Robert, XML via RSS, has changed my life.

So, I wil reiterate what Robert says. Thank you, Tim Bray. Thank you everyone who were involved in bringing XML to us all.

Side note, I love this little excerpt from Tim Bray’s post:

“By the time TimBL (Tim Berners-Lee) went to work at CERN, the Internet had been running for a few years, serving only big computers and the first wave of emailers. The CERN computer group wanted collaboration over the Net, and thought that hypertext, Ted’s invention, might be the way. So TimBL built a hypertext that worked across the Internet. Lots of computer scientists had been chiseling away at the problem for years, but TimBL ignored the entire body of theory and pasted together the simplest possible version with one-way pointers carrying no guarantees of what (if anything) they pointed at. No computer scientist could have conceived of anything so tenuous and fragile.

That turned out to be the World Wide Web, and TimBL is now famous. In mid-1998, the McArthur foundation recognized him as an official genius and wrote him a high-six-figures cheque, which is nice because a lot of other people who didn’t invent the Web have made a lot of money there.”