Give people a few hints, and they can figure out the rest. They can look at this page, see some large type followed by blocks of small type and know that they are looking at the start of a magazine article. They can look at a list of groceries and see shopping instructions. They can look at some rows of numbers and understand the state of their bank account.

Computers, of course, are not that smart; they need to be told exactly what things are, how they are related and how to deal with them. Extensible Markup Language (XML for short) is a new language designed to do just that, to make information self-describing. This simple-sounding change in how computers communicate has the potential to extend the Internet beyond information delivery to many other kinds of human activity. Indeed, since XML was completed in early 1998 by the World Wide Web Consortium (usually called the W3C), the standard has spread like wildfire through science and into industries ranging from manufacturing to medicine.

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