Word: html
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...Until recently, Opera was just one of many "alternative" browsers. Like offerings from the NCSA and Spyglass, it was seen as an also-ran that couldn't handle the Web as well as the big boys could. Frequently, these off-market browsers could not properly handle the more complicated HTML pages found on major commercial Web sites...
...hyperbole I heard from the program's designers. But the industry buzz has been strong, with glowing mentions in Wired and other press sources. What hooked me, though, was the comment of Ziff-Davis's Jim Seymour, who claimed with astonishment that Opera could read 95 percent of all HTML pages more than twice as fast as Netscape or IE on any speed connection...
Well, the Web itself is awfully big, but XML may render such breathless sentences prescient. Here's the pitch: Websites are built using markup languages--sets of rules for displaying information on a Web page. Today's standard language, HTML (hypertext markup language), was chosen at the dawn of the Web for its simplicity and the ease with which it combined pictures with plain text. This very simplicity, though, makes the Web in its current form a very tough place to do business...
...sites that contain the word recipe, and to 10,000 more that also mention low-calorie and chicken. But there's no easy way--short of looking at every one of those sites--to guide your customers to the recipe that's right for them. HTML simply lacks the software muscle to handle the business world's endless and complex transactions. "I call it Macbeth Multimedia," says Glushko, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...
Into this software cacophony strides XML (short for extensible markup language). "It's essential that all these systems talk to each other," says Tenenbaum, "and they can't today, except at the level of HTML." The Web's original markup language made it easy for humans to read Websites; XML makes it easy for machines to read them. Think of XML as doing for the Web what Windows and the Mac did for personal computers. When you click on a document on a Windows-based PC, the operating system is smart enough to recognize that you've selected a word...