If it passes early next month as expected, XML will become an official W3C recommendation. However, many developers and industry watchers are concerned that, despite assurances to the contrary, browser makers will adopt proprietary enhancements to the language, forcing them to write more than one version of their applications.
Vendors add extensions, and some of the extensions are standardized in the next version.
It goes back and forth. But even with proprietary extensions, the overall benefit of XML will make it difficult for developers to ignore. Recent newsgroup postings indicate that, although many programmers continue to be frustrated by the nonstandard HTML implementations from Microsoft and Netscape, they are resigned to the fact that they will be forced to write two sets of applications. Best described as an electronic publishing and data interchange format, XML represents an effort to standardize the delivery and categorization of data over the Web, a task that observers say HTML, which is best suited for display, handles clumsily. XML is one key prong in the effort to unify Web development into a common environment.