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Table of Contents

Introduction Where does XML come from? How does XML work?  Business integration with XML • XML, Browsers and RDF • What XML will help to achieve

XML for Not Yet Techies, cont.

Business integration with XML

Now, if you think about this for a minute, you'll realize that it's additional work, and most of us don't like doing additional work unless it's necessary. My own opinion is that as it becomes more and more common across the web, most of us will come to adopt a commonly recognized stylesheet set of tags that will be very popular. We will not try anything new or innovative unless it's necessary. In fact, there will probably be software that will automatically tag our routine documents for us.

Businesses do need to communicate with each other with a common set of tags.

This pre-defined file of commonly used tags is called a Document Type Definition (DTD)(passed over from SGML, whose syntax is not XML based), or a Schema, whose syntax is XML based. These already exist in the offline world. Many industries have set standards for their industry documents, using SGML. Right now, many industry groups are working on setting up similar online standards. There is already a CHEMXML for the chemical industry.

The W3C is busy defining a whole set of standards. Right now, the latest version is 1.5, but it is still in its infancy. The W3C calls it "a common syntax for expressing structure in data."

Structured data refers to data that is tagged for its content, meaning, or use.

That's what I already illustrated. But let's try a business example. You're a small author and self-publisher. You've just published your book, "How to Grow Hair on Artichokes." You want Amazon to sell it, and they agree, and ask for all the information they need to put it into their database. You send it to them using standard ASCII email.

Somebody at Amazon must then read the information and enter it into their database. Reading ASCII is all you can do with it.

However, by 2003 you send them the following email in ASCII but tagged according to Amazon's standard required XML style sheet:

<title>HOW TO GROW HAIR ON ARTICHOKES</title>
<author>Rachel Dogooder</author>
<publisher>Beyond the Fringe Press</publisher>
<copydate>2003</copydate>
<retailprice>$1,000,000</retailprice>
<ISBN>12345</ISBN>
<publisherdescription>This is the best book written since Shakespeare. 
                You must buy it or else.</publisherdescription>

Amazon's computer reads it and automatically sends all this information to the database, assigns the Amazon title number, even corrects the misspelling of Shakespeare's name and automatically submits it to the search engines. The book's page comes up at the top of Alta Vista when Rachel's mother requests it.

Not only that, since Rachel produced the entire book HOW TO GROW HAIR ON ARTICHOKES with XML rather than paper, she can send a free copy to every member of her high school graduating class and they can all read it no matter whether they use a cell phone, a Web TV box or any kind of computer, desk top, portable or palm fliptop.  (They can also return it to her with a few well-chosen tags of their own.)

Matthew Fuchs of Disney Imagineering summed up the use and demand for this: "Information needs to know about itself, and information needs to know about me."

XML, Browsers and RDF

It's important to stress here that it is just beginning. Hardly any web sites are making use of it, for the simple reason that hardly any browsers support it.

Netscape says it will support metadata in Communicator/Navigator 5.0. It will be a section code-named Aurora. Aurora will use the now-developing standard of RDF (Resource Description Format) to present what Netscape calls "full information integration on the desktop."

RDF is an application that is a data-modeling language using syntax.

Right now, RDF is the emerging standard that promises to catalog the Internet, making information much more readily available. We all know that there's so much information available on the Internet that zeroing in on what you really want to know is difficult. When documents use the RDF standard, it will be much easier for search engines and other intelligent agent software to find what you need, from technical data to comparing prices on books and CDs."

We want to turn Navigator into an platform," says R.V. Guha, Netscape's principal engineer.

I read that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 was the first Web browser to implement it, but not how. You could have fooled me. MSIE5 handles it but currently still renders it via Cascading Style Sheets, using a largely HTML-derived model, so that is hardly the full implementation or promise of the language.

However, Microsoft is supporting it. Bill Gates has stated that future versions of Microsoft Office will support it.  Both companies, as well as many other 3rd party vendors, will no doubt bring out tools for creating XML web sites and documents.

It will work and interact well with current web technologies. For instance, before it and DHTML, the most hyped thing on the Internet since the World Wide Web itself was the new programming language Java. Java has great promise, though most people think of it in terms of cute animated cartoons and sound effects on web sites. Java can do much more, and it will play a big role in that.

This is because, to be truly useful, many documents will need to have a small program sent along with them. The ideal language for this is obviously Java.

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