How to cite this paper

Denicola, Domenic. “Non-Extensible Markup Language.” Presented at Symposium on HTML5 and XML, Washington, DC, August 4, 2014. In Proceedings of the Symposium on HTML5 and XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 14 (2014). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol14.Denicola01.

Symposium on HTML5 and XML
August 4, 2014

Balisage Paper: Non-Extensible Markup Language

Domenic Denicola

Google

Abstract

XML's steady descent into obscurity has become more and more apparent over the last few years. Developers, tool vendors, and browser implementers have all embraced HTML as the web's markup language, built on a substrate of JavaScript. Nothing epitomizes this shift more than the recent rise of web components: instead of standards committees dreaming up domain-specific XML vocabularies and hoping one day browsers would incorporate them, web components and the extensible web principles they embody allow authors to empower HTML with the same abilities XML once promised. The HTML of today is a truly extensible markup language. Where XML failed in this mission, both historically and practically, the web ecosystem routed around the damage of XML's influence by making HTML better suited for extensibility than ever before.