The origin of (document) species

✍ Scribed by Rohit Khare; Adam Rifkin

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 964 KB
• Volume: 30
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0169-7552
• DOI: 10.1016/s0169-7552(98)00109-3

✦ Synopsis

The World Wide Web's extraordinary reach is based in part on its open assimilation of document formats. Although Web transfer protocols and addressing can accommodate any kinds of resources, the unique application context of a truly global hypermedia system favours the adoption of certain Web-adapted formats. In this paper we consider the evolutionary record that has led to the ascent of the extensible Markup Language (XML).

We present a taxonomy of document species in the Web according to their syntax, style, structure, and semantics. We observe the preferential adoption of SGML, CSS, HTML, and XML, respectively, which leverage a parsimonious evolutionary strategy favouring declarative encodings over Turing-complete languages; separable styles over inline formatting; declarative markup over presentational markup; and well-defined semantics over operational behavior.

The paper concludes with an evolutionary walkthrough of citation formats. Ultimately, combined with the self-referential power of the Web to document itself, we believe XML can catalyze a critical shift of the Web from a global information space into a universal knowledge network.