The XML specification was developed from 1996 through 1998 by a wide-ranging group of markup language experts from industry and academia.

• Computer industry: Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Netscape, Adobe, Fuji Xerox
• SGML vendors and system integrators: ArborText, Inso, SoftQuad, Grif, Isogen, Texcel
• Academic and research community: Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), NCSA, James Clark
• Early adopters: DataChannel, Vignette
• Recent additions (after XML 1.0): IBM, Oracle, Omnimark, Lotus, Xerox, SAP, Merrill Lynch, ...

XML & JAVA:   PORTABLE DATA — PORTABLE PROGRAMS