“XML is approaching 10 years old. How closely depends on how you’re counting. The W3C Recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 was published on 10 February 1998. Work on XML started around 1996, however, rooted in almost thirty years of SGML. The design principles for XML, which guided its development were published on 25 August 1996. The first working draft, published on 14 November 1996 defined documents very similar to the majority of XML you might see today.”
Link:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-think38.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01XMLDecade
