XML is not new! XML, the Extensible Markup Language, began development in 1996 and became an official World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard in 1998. XML is derived from the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which has been around for a great while. SGML has long been used as a means of document management, and is the parent of HTML. XML, on the other hand, is an outgrowth of these earlier markup languages intended for information sharing on the Internet. While HTML is effective for communicating how a page should look inside a web browser, XML speaks more to how information should be structured or used between or among applications (including web browsers) running on the Internet.