the inventor of the Web, to lead the Web to its full potential by developing protocols that would be openly shared by all people, independent of any government, business, or institution. Extensible Markup Language was developed by the SGML Editorial Board of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) . The Consortium was founded in October of 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, to lead the Web to its full potential by developing protocols that would be openly shared by all people, independent of any government, business, or institution.
The following table give a brief overview of the "who, what, when, and where" facts of XML. The rest of this report concentrates on the "why."
| Who invented XML? | XML was developed by the SGML Editorial Board of the World Wide Web Consortium. |
| What is XML? | XML is an Extensible Markup Language that is platform and application independent. |
| When was XML invented? | The initial XML draft was presented in 1996 at a conference in Boston. The official W3C specification (XML 1.0) was presented in 1998. |
| Where was XML invented? | The headquarters of the World Wide Web Consortium is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Participants from all over the world contributed to the first XML specification. |