Based on the fact that the first working draft of the design principles for XML were published on 14 November 1996, XML guru Uche Ogbuji declared this week XML's 10th Birthday.

Although the actual W3C Recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 wasn't published till 10 February 1998, work on XML definitely started - Ogbuji recounts - around 1996, rooted in almost thirty years of SGML.

"The basic idea of labeled, balanced, hierarchical tags and clearly defined text encoding were well in place in 1996," Ogbuji confirms.

IBM Systems Journal, accordingly, recently published an entire issue dedicated to XML's first decade.

"This ten-year milestone (give or take) is a good occasion to examine how to ensure that we will see the long-term benefits from having entrusted so much data to the XML sphere of technologies," says Ogbuji.

"I look forward to seeing further technical and non-technical assessments of XML's past, present and future over the next couple of years," he added.