What is the history of XML?

XML was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to bring the power of SGML to the Web in a simplified form to overcome HTML's inherent limitations and enable new kinds of Internet applications. SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language, is an ISO standard (ISO 8879: 1986) that evolved from IBM's GML. SGML is widely used for high-end publishing applications for encoding information in a vendor-independent format. SGML is also often criticized for a complex syntax that makes it hard to learn and implement and for having different syntaxes for models and instances.