The Future of Hypertext

The future of hypertext seems to lie at the moment with XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The main difference between HTML and XML is that in XML you can define your own tags and properties, but because it is a subset of SGML (almost a cut down version for the web), it should be compatible with all browsers that can parse XML.

The primary reason XML was created was to allow richly structured documents to be served over the web. It isn't a replacement for HTML, but should take care of the things that HTML has difficulty with. It will not be long before word processors and the like produce documents that can be exported as, or saved as native XML.

Timeline

Bill Kennelly ©1999 - 2000

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