INTRODUCTION
Markup languages and object-oriented programming, analysis, and design methodologies are merging into a single logical super-system, perhaps even a singular language, that one day may be as fundamental to the education of our children as is writing, reading, and arithmetic. This single language is the language that humans may use to provide instruction to computers for hundreds of years to come. I’m not proposing that this language is a substitute for the graphic user interface, nor a competitor to developments in voice recognition, and so forth. It is the language that humans will use to teach computers, to structure systems, to create functionality and structure, as opposed to the method we will use to interface with computers. It is the language we will use to relate the design, desires, rules, and requirements of our human system to the local, regional, and global computer system that we have come to depend on: a symbiotic logic.

    Neither the advocates of object-oriented programming languages nor advocates of the markup languages are likely to agree with this point of view. For the most part, they are too close to their own environments, too embedded in their technical subcultures to see the big picture, but they are indeed on a collision course that may have been determined before the majority of today’s programmers even entered the working force. More recent developments that date to 1998 in both Extensible Markup Language (XML) methodologies and Object-Orient Methodologies (OOM) have already bridged the gap and examples of the symbiotic relationship between XML and Object-oriented methodologies can be found in the public forum. As To understand how XML and object-oriented methodology interrelate it is helpful to first stand back and take a look at each approach from a historical perspective. It’s only through this perspective that the similarities and the differences become apparent.