XML is a relatively simple development. Yet it has probably been the most powerful development to date in the world of i-Technology.

From being the launchpad for information delivery on the Web (XHTML, SMIL, SVG) to electronic business communication (Chem standards, ebXML, RosettaNet, OAGIS, EDI/XML), security (SAML), Web services (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, BPEL4WS), data transformation (XSLT/XSL), and speech recognition and telephony integration (CCXML, SALT, VoiceXML), XML has quickly grown as the universal markup language to define practically anything. It has been the vehicle for practically anything that flows through the Web and has been influential in converting the Web into a ubiquitous platform for application delivery and information exchange.

An example comes to mind. In September 1998, I was participating in SAP's TechEd technology conference in Los Angeles, in a session focused on how an interactive speech recognition system can be integrated with the R/3 ERP system. It was pointed out that as part of the speech recognition process, a developer is required to build a grammar for the system that specifies a set of utterances that a user may speak, and a particular grammar format tuned for the speech recognition platform was presented. I wondered if that grammar format could be described in XML; sure enough, earlier this year, W3C Voice Browser Activity announced a candidate recommendation of the XML-based Speech Recognition Grammar Specification.

This is really the success of XML.

However, it has not always been a bed of roses for XML, which has had - and probably always will have - its share of issues.

For instance, soon after the XML specification was released, the XML community realized that DTDs weren't going to be sufficient for the definition of the rich, strongly typed vocabularies that we'd like to define using XML. This led to the development of a large list of data-definition focused markup languages (MLs). Overall, I think it took us way too long to get the XML Schema specification out the door.

There is such growth around the various industry-specific vocabularies that it can sometimes beget confusion in the IT community. In the world of financial services, for example, there are many MLs out there, some of them overlapping one another significantly. Of late, we saw a similar fragmentation happening again, with the emergence of a number of initiatives focused around the whole concept of Web services orchestration and business process management - BPML, XLANG, WSFL, BPEL4WS, and so on.

I would not dispute the value of these efforts. Some of these initiatives have undoubtedly enjoyed an excellent level of participation by expert technology and business players. However, a key lesson that the XML revolution has taught us is that simplicity is best. It is important that we keep that message in mind - and stop the clutter. Furthermore, in these tough economic times, we need to concentrate our efforts only on those standards that can impact real-world business by solving real-world problems.

Who should really receive the credit for the ever-rising success of XML? My own favorites are the W3C and a number of large software development organizations, particularly Microsoft. And it looks like I am not alone in thinking this. Initial results from the online poll that we have initiated at www.sys-con.com/xml show that W3C and Microsoft Corporation are our readers' favorites as well.

As the medium for the collective evolution of the core set of standards around XML, the W3C has played a key role. Meantime, Microsoft has been instrumental in supporting XML in practically everything that it develops, from supporting XML/XSL in IE to the new .NET Framework, to including XML in the .NET Speech platform (using SALT) - and even in the newly announced Office 11. Microsoft has also been a key visionary around Web services and has initiated some remarkable collaborative work with IBM, another pioneer in this space.

Special credit should go to those technology-savvy CIOs of the Fortune 1000 organizations who have laid down a clear vision of IT in their organization as "XML friendly and compliant." No technology is ever greater than its business applications: the initiative and funding of real-world business organizations have really made XML what it is today, and it's no coincidence that the focus of XML-J, in addition to being a technical journal, is on real-world business scenarios, issues, and implementations of XML.

With all this success, one might be forgiven for thinking that XML had pretty much achieved all its goals. On the contrary, I think what we have seen so far is really just the beginning of the success of XML.