Chapter 3. Standards and Applications

The Information Technology industry is rife with acronyms, made-up words, and terminology that is uniformly confounding to the outsider. Another field that has a similar love of unpronounceable and obscure terminology is aviation. My grandfather was a commercial pilot for many years, amassing more than 10,000 hours of flying time over the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. I spent many hours down on the ramp, listening to pilots talk to each other.

Naturally, I was subjected to the same torture that many of my non-IT friends must experience when they are forced to listen to a conversation between two programmers. Imagine being a 10-year-old boy and trying to decipher the following anecdote: “Well, I was PIC of a flight from CKB to CLT. We were IMC and I was trying to get ATIS when my left mag went Tango Uniform.” Fortunately, aviation terminology evolves much more slowly than IT terminology. I guess the fact that a misunderstanding can cause the listener to impact a mountain at 250 knots instead of just crashing a Web site tends to suppress innovation for innovation's sake… .

Since the initial release of the XML 1.0 recommendation in February 1998, myriad related and complementary technologies have been developed. In XML parlance, any custom vocabulary of XML tags is called an application. But many of these “applications” are actually extensions to XML itself (such as XML Schemas).

To an XML neophyte, understanding how the various technologies interrelate can be a difficult task. Further complicating matters, many of the new XML-related technologies are actually implemented using XML. For instance, the Extensible Stylesheet Language standard is in tended to provide a framework for formatting and displaying XML data. Of course, these stylesheets are themselves written in XML, introducing the possibility of interesting self-referencing applications.