FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near future?
Sergey: At least I'm not intended to cancel the xMarkup project. I will continue extending functionality of this utility and will make it more bugless.

FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for xMarkup?
Sergey: It was more then 10 years ago. A friend asked me to help - he was in a process of creating web site and was boring of endless search and replace operations on a lot of html documents at once. So I composed a tiny utility to do this and called it xMarkup. Afterwards xMarkup has been rewritten many times. Some things were buried, some added - phase of initial evolution lasted during 2 or 3 years.

FW Editor: Do you plan to develop new software, or are you more focused on optimizing the current ones?
Sergey: Actually, I am working also on another my project - WordTabulator. This program is intended to generate ordered index of defined text elements (words or phrases) from a set of text documents in SGML/XML/HTML or plain text format. Last version of this program was released quite long ago, so I need to rework it completly. WordTabulator is tight linked with xMarkup. In the future these two programs shall be bundled together.

FW Editor: How would you define xMarkup in just a few words?
Sergey: For me it's a simple framework to implement different algorithms of text processing. Of any kind. With xMarkup you can get results very fast and easy.

FW Editor: What is your favorite feature of xMarkup?
Sergey: Of course, in-built procedural language - it's very cool to code on the same language on which xMarkup itself written. It is like of self-producing or self-referencing.

FW Editor: What are the advantages of using xMarkup over any other similar product?
Sergey: There is a pretty good tool which called TextTransformer (http://www.texttransformer.com). It does exactly the same things as xMarkup. But you need to be a C++ programmer to understand and use this tool professionally. xMarkup is more easy. You can be not a programmer at all to use it.

FW Editor: Why have you choose Icon as a cross-platform language for xMarkup?
Sergey: Because Icon became my favorite language at the beginning of 90-s. Such languages as Java came to me much later. Now I would think twice, which way is better. There are such a lot of Java-originated special languages. And xMarkup could be yet another tool written on Java and enabled to execute Java code...

FW Editor: Do you have any message for xMarkup users?
Sergey: I would be happy if this software makes life easy to someone.