XML & e-Commerce

 
The "good news" about e-commerce and web commerce is that it's not too late to get started. In fact, one of the most significant technical developments is presently in it's very early stages. It's called the "Extensible Markup Language" or XML and it's an extension of the HTML system of coding text to display it in a web browser. For the novice, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and it's the system that makes the world wide web more than a simple text based medium as the Internet used to be. HTML is a lot like a word processing program that creates "tags" that format text in different ways such as the number of indent spaces, whether the text is single or double spaced, the size of the text and even the type of font used. HTML also tells the browser when to display different colors and can be used to display a graphic image.

One of the main reasons for the furious growth of the WWW is because the HTML system of tagging information is a standardized system - everywhere in the world. Everyone who wants to use the web has to adapt to the standard, although Microsoft and Netscape introduce some features that are unique to their browsers. Even so, their popular new features are usually included in the next version of the competing product so it's only the newest release of each program that has some incompatible features.

XML will do the same thing for the transmission of different kinds of data over the Internet. It may be used with a browser like Netscape, but it can be also be used for computer to computer communications. Instead of tags that tell a browser how to display certain data, XML will tell the receiving program (which could be a database or an accounting application) what kind of data is being transmitted. There are tags for names, phone numbers, addresses, zip codes, a birth date, age, sex, a bank account number, a credit card number, etc. etc. etc. The American Institute of CPAs is working to develop a specialized version of XML to transmit financial data from company financial statements with XML tags that identify the type of data. One of the articles about e-commerce at the AICPA web site <www.aicpa.org> is about the XML system for those who want more background on it.

It will take a few years at most, but when the leading web browsers implement and incorporate the standards set for XML, the web can then be used for much more company-to-company integration of information. Today you are on the cutting edge of this major new development in communication technology. Because this is a new and highly significant issue in e-commerce, I'll be looking into it further, and will comment on what I learn in future issues.

Like HTML, the standards for XML are expected to be adopted world wide, thereby creating a truly standardized system of communication of electronic data from any where in the world to any where in the world. I'm not sure yet how the language problem will be solved, but it's been resolved for HTML and something similar will be used for XML.