Balise, a well known European SGML transformation environment acquired in January 1999 by Inso Corporation, will be XMLized and distributed as open source, it was announced at XML Europe 2000.

Described by Lars Marius Garshol as: "a powerful scripting language for conversions, validation, database import and other tasks built over James Clark's SP SGML/XML parser", Balise had not undergone any major development since Inso Corporation acquired the product and release 5, announced in January 99 is still awaited.

The decision to open source Balise was probably necessary to keep the product afloat and it should open up the game in the field of XML transformation languages where Balise will join XSLT, Omnimark and DSSSL.

The applause which followed this announcement in the XML Europe 2000 lunch room demonstrated that the product is still present in the memory of its European users.