InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
March 15, 1999
XML Changes The RulesBy Jason Levitt, InformationWeek Labs
he Extensible Markup Language is a simplified subset of the Standardized General Markup
Language, a large, complex set of rules for defining document structures. SGML has been evolving
for almost 30 years. It's been used mainly by government agencies, publishing companies, and
large data-processing users as a tool for document-management systems. Tim Berners-Lee,
creator of the World Wide Web, designed a simple SGML-based formatting language called HTML.
HTML is relatively small and easy to implement, but it's difficult to extend because it uses a predefined set of formatting identifiers, known as "tags." XML replaces HTML's static set of tags with the ability to define your own tags and document structure. With XML, a document's structure is described in a Document Type Definition, rules that describe how a set of XML tags are related. Once interested parties agree on a set of XML tags and a corresponding DTD, they can easily exchange data encoded with those XML tags.
The focus across vertical industries such as electronics has been to define specific DTDs so
businesses can exchange data. Business-to-business E-commerce and document management are
among the areas that will benefit from the adoption of standardized sets of XML tags.
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