November 06, 2000 New Thinking:
Why XML is important
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November 06, 2000
Why XML is important
By Gerry McGovern
What has made the Internet useful to hundreds of millions of people is that it used standards for the presentation of content. No matter what you sort of content you had, once you presented it using HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language), people all over the world could read it using a web browser. Having a standard such as HTML caused a genuine revolution.
Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is an evolution of HTML. It brings in vital new standards for how we organize our content. But why do we need new standards? Information overload is why.
There are presently 2.5 billion documents on the Internet, growing at 7.5 million a day. If we include intranets and extranets, the number of documents rises to an incredible 550 billion. If we don’t agree common standards for the organization of the content in these documents, we will face increasing chaos and inefficiency in how we create, organize, find and digest information.
Someone once famously described the Internet as a great library with all the books on the floor and the lights turned out. Well, XML is about turning the lights on and putting the books on the shelves in an organized manner.
XML is more than just putting ‘books’ on shelves. It’s about looking at how content itself is structured and trying to achieve common rules. It looks at, say, ‘morning notes’ from the financial industry and says: ‘What are the key sections/headings within this piece of content?’
If the financial industry decided to implement an XML standard then it would come up with an agreed standard by which all morning notes would be created in the future. Morning notes would then have a common template that would have fields like: Organization Name, Date, Company Symbol, Analyst Name, Buy, Sell, Profit Warning.
Now, what good is all that to the person who uses the Internet? Well, what it means is that with XML standards, we find the right content a lot more quickly. If I’m a fund manager, for example, I can find the two ‘Sell’ morning notes on Company X over the last twelve months, rather than hundreds of general morning notes.
Like all standards, if XML is not used widely it loses its central benefit – standardization. There are a number of indications that XML is gaining such a wide acceptance.
An XML standard is emerging with regard to how the world’s news industry organizes its content. Reuters, Agence-France-Presse, BusinessWire, Press Association, UPI, and Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal.com have agreed to use the standard. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to implement an XML standard for dealing with patents. Continental Airlines is implementing an XML standard to improve the production and management of its technical manuals.
Bill Gates and Microsoft is getting behind XML. At the Microsoft CEO summit in May 2000, Gates predicted that XML would usher in the “the third phase of the Internet”. He talked about how it was a dramatic change for the software industry. "It's really about connecting things," Gates stated. The major Microsoft .Net initiative, for example, uses XML standards.
By establishing standards, the Internet transformed our ability to communicate using computers. XML is about establishing standards for 'what' we communicate using computers. Those organizations and industries that embrace such standards will thrive in the information economy.
Gerry McGovern
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Like all standards, if XML is not used widely it loses its central benefit – standardization.
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