3. Conclusions and outlook

XML's field of application has grown steadily since its standardization by W3C in 1998. Originally conceived for structured documents, XML quickly found its way into data modeling activities and, in particular, Web applications. The many XML dialects and variants developed since 1998 to facilitate these modeling, development and deployment activities for enterprise applications were often originally the result of ad hoc group initiatives and coalitions of software publishers and major IT users. XML's "universal" character is what has made it such a success, both conceptually and in terms of concrete applications.

The organization of these many and varied standards has gradually, but ultimately rapidly, taken shape, and three major international bodies are now the driving forces and repositories of these standardization efforts. The W3C, in a distinctly technical...