Why was XML chosen to be the foundation of the OSIS standard?
XML has several important virtues. First, it allows describing the structure of documents, not just how they are to be formatted. Because of this, documents in XML can be used for much more than page production. Exactly the same files can directly feed Web delivery, production in multiple formats (Braille, print, audio, large-print, e-books, and so on), and even non-reading formats such as indexing, automated linguistic analysis, and so on. Second, XML has achieved a breadth and depth of adoption never before seen for any document format. Its predecessor SGML quickly became the format of choice for very large scale projects, in the 1980s: aircraft and other technical manuals, legal, medical, and policy documents, as well as huge collections of literary and scholarly texts. But SGML had a high learning curve, and so did poorly for smaller-scale projects. XML is a tiny subset of SGML that is compatible, and yet far easier to learn, use, and implement. XML is especially appropriate for OS
