This post by Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems provides a nice bit of History about the beginnings of XML and the people who made it happen. It's hard to believe it's now over 10 years old. I remember early on in the life of XML when not that many people really understood it, what it was supposed to solve and how it was formed. Many people i knew were perplexed about finding out how to 'write xml', thinking there was a single form that solved all problems. Indeed, it was this casual, human readable nature that made it initially rather foreign to some people so used to 'set format' HTML markup.  Only when people realised the true scope and power of writing well formed, hierarchical, validated data in a human and machine readable form did it take off like wildfire. Most developers now don't go a day without seeing  xml.

Of course while it solved so many problems, it created nearly as many. XML Bloat is still an issue for instance. It can be a performance killer. But like all things that CAN be misued, it is highly likely with such an open and ubiquitous tool it WILL be misused. Nothing is absolute, and personally i think Xml's positives far outweigh the negatives.  So 10 years on and xml now forms the basis of messaging, data storage and retrieval, configuration, presentation (WPF etc!), decision logic (rules engines), entity representation, APIs and more. It's even used in the likes of Video games like World of Warcraft.

Well done for surviving the decade - I can't see Xml retiring anytime soon!