Building the Annotated XML Specification

by Tim Bray
September 12, 1998

The design of XML 1.0 stretched over 20 months ending in February 1998, with input from a couple of hundred of the world's best experts in the area of markup, publishing, and Web design. The result of that work, the XML 1.0 Specification, is a highly condensed document that contains little or no information about how it came to read the way it does.

Even before the release of XML 1.0, it became obvious that some parts of the spec were self-explanatory, while others were causing headaches for its users.

The Annotated XML Specification addresses both of these problems. It supplements the basic specification, first with historical background and explanation of how things came to be the way they are, and second with detailed explanations of the portions of the spec that have proved difficult. Commercially, it has been a success; in its first month on the Web, it had over 100,000 page views from over 26,000 unique Internet addresses. It remains, by a substantial margin, the most popular item available at the XML.com site.

This article explains how I created the Annotated XML Specification. If you haven't looked at it, you might want to give it a glance before reading about it, or even better, open it in another browser window while you read about it here.

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