Here is an interesting article on XML. Can anyone with a technical eye sort out if XML makes Jot technology redundant in the future?
TECHNOLOGY NOVEMBER 10, 1997 VOL. 150 NO. 20
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KEEPING TABS ONLINE
DOING BUSINESS ON THE NET IS HARD BECAUSE THE UNDERLYING SOFTWARE IS SO
DUMB. XML WILL FIX THAT
BY MICHAEL KRANTZ
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The Web is broken, but don't worry--Marty Tenenbaum knows how to fix it.
Tenenbaum is chairman of CommerceNet, a nonprofit organization based in
Palo Alto, Calif., and devoted, unsurprisingly, to promoting commerce on
the Net. And his silver bullet, an obscure design language called XML,
is about to transform cyberspace.
Really. "This is the most important thing that will happen to the Web
next year," says Bob Glushko, Tenenbaum's point man on XML and director
of CommerceNet's for-profit spinoff, CNGroup. "XML," says Eckart
Walther, product manager for browser leader Netscape, which, along with
archrival Microsoft, has already climbed aboard the XML bandwagon, "is
going to be as big as the Web itself."
Well, the Web itself is awfully big, but XML may render such breathless
sentences prescient. Here's the pitch: Websites are built using markup
languages--sets of rules for displaying information on a Web page.
Today's standard language, HTML (hypertext markup language), was chosen
at the dawn of the Web for its simplicity and the ease with which it
combined pictures with plain text. This very simplicity, though, makes
the Web in its current form a very tough place to do business.
Suppose, for example, you wanted to start a site called recipe.com that
would let users scour the Web for that perfect low-cal poultry dish for
12. Any search engine can link you to 100,000 sites that contain the
word recipe, and to 10,000 more that also mention low-calorie and
chicken. But there's no easy way--short of looking at every one of those
sites--to guide your customers to the recipe that's right for them. HTML
simply lacks the software muscle to handle the business world's endless
and complex transactions. "I call it Macbeth Multimedia," says Glushko,
"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
In the past few years one eager start-up after another has rushed in to
fill this vacuum, producing nearly 100 online commerce "standards," each
vying to be the Web's one and only. Netscape and Microsoft, for their
part, have responded by packing more and more proprietary software
tricks into their increasingly unwieldy and overburdened browsers.
Into this software cacophony strides XML (short for extensible markup
language). "It's essential that all these systems talk to each other,"
says Tenenbaum, "and they can't today, except at the level of HTML." The
Web's original markup language made it easy for humans to read Websites;
XML makes it easy for machines to read them. Think of XML as doing for
the Web what Windows and the Mac did for personal computers. When you
click on a document on a Windows-based PC, the operating system is smart
enough to recognize that you've selected a word-processing document or a
spreadsheet or a piece of E-mail, and to launch the appropriate
application. XML makes Websites smart enough to tell other machines
whether they're looking at a recipe, an airline ticket or a pair of
easy-fit blue jeans with a 34-in. waist.
Created earlier this year by a team of programmers working for the World
Wide Web Consortium and led by Sun Microsystems' Jon Bosak, XML lets Web
developers put "tags" on their Web pages that describe bits of
information in, say, a food recipe as "ingredients," "calories,"
"cooking time" and "number of portions." Using XML, your newly empowered
browser no longer has to search the entire Web to find that low-calorie
chicken recipe; it just has to locate the recipe sites and thumb through
the relevant tags.
The same logic applies across the board. When XML kicks in sometime next
year, after the Web Consortium finalizes its standard, any entrepreneurs
who do business on the Net--travel agents, stockbrokers,
pornographers--will need only to create a set of agreed-upon tags to
make it immeasurably easier to buy and sell and communicate with one
another and with their customers. This huge leap in efficiency will in
turn help produce the explosion of online commerce the Web community has
been impatiently waiting for. Pretty cool, eh?
Anyway, it was a sufficiently compelling pitch to shake loose some cash
from the U.S. government. Last month a small consortium led by
CommerceNet and CNGroup won a $5 million grant from the Commerce
Department's Advanced Technology Program to promote the group's
XML-based eCo (electronic commerce) system. The goal, says Tenenbaum,
"is to bring together all the people in a given industry and say, 'Guys,
let's sit down and agree on a set of core services.' That's how you
build communities of commerce."
Sure, but as Clinton and Jiang will attest, sitting down is much easier
than agreeing. Silicon Valley has already come to lawsuits over Java,
the programming language for creating online applications that sit on
top of markup languages such as HTML and XML. Now, although both
Microsoft and Netscape have agreed to adopt XML (Microsoft's Internet
Explorer 4.0 already supports some XML applications, and Explorer 5.0
and Netscape's Navigator 5.0, both due early next year, will support
full-blown XML), each company seems to be maneuvering to make XML suit
its own proprietary needs. Microsoft is using XML for its new Channel
Definition Format for "push" media, and Netscape will integrate the new
language into its upcoming Web-design software suite, code-named Gemini
and due in mid-1998, hoping XML and Gemini will form the centerpiece of
the network computer that Apple and Sun are building as an alternative
to today's dominant Intel and Microsoft Windows PC standard.
XML represents terrain worth fighting over. It won't just make today's
Web work better; it will also clear the way for countless new activities
and enterprises that were too cumbersome to work on the Web at all. Say
you're a frequent flyer who has purchased advance airline tickets in the
middle of a fare war and wants to take advantage of any subsequent price
drops. That's a service human travel agents can provide for you, but
they're rarely motivated to do so. In tomorrow's XML world, it will be a
simple matter for you to hire or create an "intelligent agent"--a kind
of robot software program--that patiently monitors the industry's daily
blizzard of XML price tags for favorable fluctuations, trading in your
tickets for cheaper ones whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Tenenbaum--a longtime proselytizer for online commerce, whose Enterprise
Integration Technologies developed much of the technology that makes Web
transactions possible--believes that XML offers nothing less than "the
real possibility of fundamentally restructuring the way a given industry
works." If you can get everyone in, say, the real estate business--the
brokers, the escrow agents, the mortgage banks--to adopt XML, says
Tenenbaum, "you really can start to think about changing the rules:
paperless closings, real-time mortgage bidding..."
Even in its infancy, XML tends to inspire daydreams at that level. Next
year we'll find out how many of them actually come true. |
