XML has become interwoven into our daily programming lives. It brought robustness and stability to web design in the form of XHTML and became the backbone of countless other document formats. But who created it?

In the early days of the web, standards were sparse. Web developers familiar with SGML, or Standard Generalized Markup Language, realized a new implementation of SGML could standardize web-related data parsing. The first to push for this was Dan Connolly, who recommended that the W3C work on it when he joined their staff in 1995. Connolly was already experienced with SGML and was the main editor of the HTML 2.0 specification.

A W3C working group of 11 main members formed to create the XML specification. These members already held important web-related positions at the time, and many have continued to have prominent development careers. Jon Bosak, who was almost as instrumental in running the project as Connolly, worked for Sun Microsystems from 1996 to 2008. Tim Bray was Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, and during the formation of XML consulted at Netscape. He currently serves as a Developer Advocate for Google Android. Jean Paoli, fittingly, is General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft.