Reading #1

Sperberg-McQueen, C .M. (1998).  XML and the future of digital libraries.  Journal of Academic Librarianship, 24(4), 314-317.

The rise of XML in digital libraries at the end of the 20^th century is described through answering questions about the impact of the markup language.  The article asks what the presence of XML means for users of the Web and information professionals.  A comparison with HTML reveals that XML can be thought of as a subset of SGML, but is different enough from HTML to require some change in thinking from those who use HTML.  Some key specifications, such as the Extensible Style Language (XSL) are introduced to demonstrate how XML documents will now be displayed through a browser.  Some frequently asked questions are addressed in order to clarify some misinformation about XML.  The  conclusion is, the organizations who currently only use HTML for encoding and storing their documents will likely face difficulties in making the switch to XML, but most organizations that use TEI or another SGML DTD will need to make very little changes in their current procedures.