XML is the new HTML

Back when people first started talking about XML, it was referred to as “the new HTML” – that HTML soon would be replaced and people would write their web pages in XML instead, and that this was good because XML was extensible!

Now, XML turned out not to be the new HTML. Rather, it was the new SGML, which was the metalanguage used to define the HTML language. And although XHTML was defined using XML, it didn’t catch on. But XML soon became very successful in the field of file formats, to the extent that you got the feeling that people started to think about which new file formats they could invent just to use XML!

Then XML started to become a metalanguage for network based communication, for which it is really well suited. Using DTD and/or XSchema the provider of a service can say: “Oh, I’ll talk to you as long as what you say to me comes in this format”. This made the task of synchronizing the message formats between two parties a whole lot easier.

Last week Google announced the beta for the Google SOAP API (although a query on a mailing list from one of the developers at Google gave a hint that this was about to happen) and in a matter of hours all sorts of things popped up that used this API. And this morning, Amazon sent an email to their associates about their new XML API:

By putting Amazon.com XML directly into your hands, you’ll now have the flexibility to display dynamic product information in any way you choose.

So, I guess that XML is the new HTML, in a sense I couldn’t predict when it was called that during the initial stage of (inevitable?) confusion. That is, that it is “HTML for machines”. It will be interesting to see what happens now, what this Amazon.com XML API will be used for.

(As a sidenote, I saw the term “SCRAPI” for the API that all websites have in the form of HTML, that you can use by writing apps that request pages and “scrape” them for information. It seems it was coined by Paul Bausch.)