Background info on XML (does not mention BITS)
XML rides the e-business wave
By Wylie Wong
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
December 30, 1999, 5:30 a.m. PT
Extensible Markup Language is fast becoming the "e" in
e-business.
After several years of research and development, 1999 was the
year Extensible Markup Language (XML) was commercially born as
software makers, big and small, embraced the technology and
began building it into their products.
XML is a Web standard touted as having the potential to
revolutionize the way businesses exchange data. It not only allows
companies to easily and cheaply conduct online transactions with
their customers and partners, it also delivers sound, video and
other data across the Web.
Businesses that use cutting-edge technologies, such as General
Motors, have even begun incorporating XML into their corporate
systems.
"1999 was the year that XML stepped away from its research
background and became a real technology," said analyst Phil Costa
of Giga Information Group. "Now it's got the support of the software
vendor community, as well as the user community, who've proven
its usefulness in their strategic projects."
XML is a variant of HTML, a language used to generate Web pages
on a computer. Unlike HTML, which has a predefined vocabulary,
XML allows developers to define their own vocabulary for data,
such as price and product. The result is more efficient data
exchange and better Internet searching capabilities.
Standards organizations, like the World Wide Web Consortium, and
software firms, however, are still fine-tuning the technology--and
much work remains. The biggest issue facing XML now is whether
software firms, like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, and
companies in specific industries, such as banking and health care,
can put their competitive differences aside and agree on common
formats to use XML.
The fear is that software companies will push for incompatible
versions of XML that best fit their own product strategies, which
could hurt XML's cross-industry appeal.
"It would be a great boon for society if everyone can agree on a
common format for XML," said Meta Group analyst Craig Roth.
Microsoft and a nonprofit consortium called Oasis, which includes
IBM, Sun and Oracle, launched competing efforts to create a set of
guidelines for specific industries to define their XML
vocabularies--and define a common method for businesses to
handle and route data to each other. They also launched portal
sites designed to serve as repositories for the XML vocabularies
and resource centers for businesses who need information on
implementing XML.
Microsoft in early December released its set of XML guidelines,
called the BizTalk framework. Oasis is developing its own
guidelines, called Electronic Business XML (EBXML), and plans to
deliver a final version in 15 to 18 months. |
