Extension standards
One key design decision that was made during the development of XML was to keep the language small. This was done in order to encourage application developers to support the standard, and to help ensure that the cost of development would be minimized: a strategy that has worked extremely well, as the subsequent widespread availability of low-cost (sometimes free) XML tools has demonstrated.
Another key decision made was that XML should be backward compatible with SGML, so that existing SGML tools could be utilized in XML projects, and protecting the investment of organizations that had already adopted SGML.
These two decisions were certainly valid, but as a result there has been pressure to:
replace some of the more archaic ...
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