Two years after putting aside rivalries to work together to solve a problem with Internet data exchange, a group of leading technology companies has agreed on a new flexible standard for describing data that is transferred over the Internet that will be a boon to business-to-business and e-commerce Web sites.
Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and SAP, among others, volunteered their work on the standard, which is called XML (Extensible Markup Language) schema. The World Wide Web Consortium is overseeing the standards process.
XML schema will allow Web developers to use a common method for identifying Web data. It will also allow developers to more easily transfer formatted data – such as prices, dates and numbers – which are all key to e-commerce, as well as video and audio.
Unlike the existing standard, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which rigidly defines how Web page elements are displayed with predefined data tags, XML can be used to define what data the elements contain. Developers can write XML tags for specific purposes, allowing Web pages to function like database records.
A standard is necessary so that data and e-commerce and other transactional processes operate well across the Web. The XML standard should ease the development of Web pages for e-commerce and other activities that rely on pre-formatted data. Microsoft's .Net initiative and Sun's SunOne Web services effort will take advantage of XML.
The W3C standards group is jointly run by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in the U.S., the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control in France, and Keio University in Japan.
