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November 8, 1999

IT Executives Praise XML And Pine For A Standard
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On the other hand, XML needs to be designed specifically for each industry. RosettaNet, for example, developed 5,000 words for its XML specification, 3,500 of which are unique to products only found in the IT supply chain, such as "mouse part" or "semiconductor." There's no way of getting around industry-specific XML versions if XML is to prove effective, Chehade says. "Like Esperanto, XML will fail if developers try to make it too universal," he says.

The key for XML is that each industry or horizontal business community needs to develop just one version of XML to address its needs, Oasis' Walker says. But this only addresses the needs of data exchange within the same industry. Companies exchanging data among multiple industries, such as office equipment suppliers, will inevitably have to bridge the gap between various XML versions.

Fortunately, XML's flexible nature will likely make translation between various versions relatively easy, some analysts and users predict. Coco Jaenicke, a product marketing manager at Object Design Inc., a Burlington, Mass., E-business data-management software developer, says XML incorporates a suite of languages that facilitate the exchange of data.

For instance, a partner language to XML is the Extensible Style Sheet Language (XSL), which Jaenicke says offers an easy solution for a trading partner that must deal with customers across industries. XSL can map the information from one set of XML data to a set of XML data using a different data-type definition, serving as a translator of sorts. "XML is extraordinarily flexible and extensible," Jaenicke says.

Laura Walker Photo by Stephen Sherman XSL, however, hasn't been ratified by any of the XML standards bodies. So tools for its development and use are still lacking. Jaenicke, for example, says Object Design will not release an XSL processor until next year.

Even though translating different industry versions of XML should prove relatively easy, there's still concern that if more than one version of XML develops within each industry, the translation challenge will start to multiply exponentially, costing all companies concerned additional time and money to create new XSL mapping interfaces. Companies involved in horizontal trading groups that intersect across industries could end up translating dozens of different versions of XML data type definitions and vocabularies.

To avoid such a scenario, Walker says IT managers should look to non-profit XML specification-development groups that broadly represent an industry. The other step is for each leading XML standards consortium for a specific industry to cooperate with other XML standards groups in a related industry.

Photo by Jamie Tanaka FinXML, for example, addresses 90% of the data-exchange needs of the wholesale banking industry. One of its remaining challenges is to integrate XML specifications from groups in the financial industry focused on other types of financial transactions, says Viral Tolat, chief technology officer of Integral Corp., a founding member of the group that developed the open standard for FinXML.

In the end, there are no easy answers for development of XML specifications. Unlike some other Internet technologies--E-mail, for example--one monolithic standard won't work. For XML to reach its full potential, it must fractionalize into different specifications for various data exchange situations in every industry.

Best-case scenario: Each industry ends up with only one specification--the best one--for using XML to exchange data pertaining to its business. The way IT managers can ensure that this happens is by making their opinions heard. Says Walker of Oasis: "Anyone interested in using XML in the future should participate in specification development."

If so, when you go to grab an XML toolkit, like Andy Astor, you'll know that it works.

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