General Concepts

In the age of worldwide information networks, documents must be easily accessible, portable and flexible. They must also be system- and platform-independent, and content-dependent. Generalized markup possesses these features, offering documents strength not found in other document description languages. The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the Web language of choice, although it is problematic and limiting. XML solves many of the problems Web authors have experienced with HTML and is responsible for XHTML, a recanted HTML, in XML. Web authors and other publishers will be using XML for many years because it offers them an effective and powerful multi-media publishing solution.