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Awoke 英国留学生计算机软件论文 among developers goes like this: a few of them meet one Saturday morning for a round of golf, and one is complaining about some trouble he’s in. A colleague from another company says, “Don’t worry. I know what to do. In our company, when there’s problem, someone somewhere always says, ‘Let’s use XML,’and a miracle occurs!”

There is often an element of truth in such jokes. This little story is funny because we all expect so much from XML that somewhere along the line it has, to a certain degree, become witchcraft accessory — a talisman against evil, a remedy for all our pains, hopes and desires. An increasing number of companies insist on using XML in all their projects, although they are not always sure why.

How has a simple markup language become so popular, and where do the true advantages in using XML lie? Hundreds of books have been written on the subject, and there is so much XML activity in the computer world that an article of this length can only skim the surface. We will thus concentrate one single area in which XML is indeed becoming a major painkiller: localization.

To explain the benefits of XML in localization, it is worth looking back down the road traveled so far. We first met markup languages more than twenty years ago. The mother of them all was Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a meta-language soon to be followed by a great intuitive language called Signed Document Markup Language (SDML).Some people associate SGML with IBM and SDML with DEC.While both companies participated extensively in the development of these languages, made them popular and used themes a priority for their own needs, many other organizations were involved in defining and spreading these standards.

As we look at markup languages of the 1980s, we see that one thing is true for them all: at that time they were exclusively used for documentation. Building software or client-server applications using SGML was unthinkable. Developers’ fashionable languages were Pascal and C or the object-oriented++. SGML and SDML applications included browsers, parsers and utilities. Consisting of pure text, they can run in heterogeneous proprietary environment on any PC, mini or mainframe. They are, however, resource intensive, especially when the content is voluminous or when even basic windowing features are used. And their extreme complexity required indepthprogramming knowledge if you wanted to use them extensively. This combination of factors probably explains why markup languages went out of fashion. Much lighter proprietary editors soon replaced them, and WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, Interleaf, Frame Maker and PageMaker promptly entered the battlefield. IBM still uses SGML for its own end-user documentation, and both SDML and SGML have always been popular in large corporations and administration sin sectors such as aerospace, automotive and telecommunications, not to mention banks and the US tax administration.

Light but “closed” proprietary PC editors gave the emerging localization industry a terrific shove. Seemingly easy to use, the early versions of these applications were in reality tricky, unstable and unpredictable when porting files from one version to another. You needed an expert team to deliver the turnkey document set in 12 languages on time. They did, however, allow for a decentralized organization of the production chain, and at least all actor本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。