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teddyh parent
HTML pretended to be a subset of SGML, but never really was, and the illusion quickly dispersed as time went on, since HTML was strictly pragmatic and ran in resource-constrained environments (the desktop), while SGML was academic, largely theoretical, and ran on servers, analyzing text.

XML, on the other hand, was more of a back-formation – a generalization of HTML; it was not, as I understand it, directly related to SGML in any way. The existence of XML was a reaction to SGML being impractical, so it would be strange if XML directly derived from SGML.

tannhaeuser
> XML [...] was not [...] directly related to SGML in any way

That's incorrect. XML is by definition a proper subset of WebSGML, the SGML revision specified in ISO 8879:1986 Annex K. These two specifications were published around the same time and authored by the same people.

In a nutshell, XML added DTD-less SGML (eg. such that every document can be parsed without markup declarations, unlike eg. HTML which has `img` and other empty elements the parser needs to know about) and XML-style empty elements. The features removed from SGML to become XML were tag inference/omission (as used in HTML), short references (for things such as Wiki syntax, CSV, and even JSON parsing), uses of marked sections other than `CDATA`, more complex use cases for notations, and link process declarations ("stylesheets") plus a couple others.

dfox
XML was intended as subset of SGML that can be meaningfully parsed without knowing DTD of document in question, which involves removing a lot of weird SGML features and constraining others. Formally XML is not SGML subset as there are some unimportant and some quite critical incompatible details.

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