The way business approaches the Net is about to change radically, reports Neil McIntosh
On the face of it, XML sounds dull. You won’t be able to see it, it will add no fancy animations or multimedia-rich content to your screen, and it doesn’t come with a metallic finish or colourful see-through skin. It’s a programming language, and even its arrival has been less than spectacular – endless consortium meetings, lengthy technical discussions on mailing lists, papers, more discussions, all stretched over years.
But don’t be deceived. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is ready to change completely how – and where – we use the Net and the way we do business on it. Bill Gates, speaking at last week’s Comdex in Las Vegas, said Microsoft’s next major emphasis – previous “major emphasis” has gone on the personal computer desktop and the Internet -will be XML. “XML is very central … it speaks to inter-operability at the semantic level.”
He later added, in straightforward English: “People will never have to re- enter the same information again and again, and they won’t have to move their bookmarks and contacts. There will be personalisation everywhere.”
And here lies the point. Anyone who has used the Net for more than a few minutes knows it is a chaotic place. There are 10 000 websites being added every day, while the material already there is constantly evolving, moving or disappearing. It might be helping to create the greatest library the world has ever seen, but you’re paying for that growth through tediously long downloads and irrelevant search results.
The problem is, nobody knows what – or where – everything is. Like baffled librarians, search engines know exactly where a little of the information is kept, and have a rough idea of where no more than 35% of the Web is hidden – or, at least, where it used to be. But they lack so much as a virtual card index to tell them exactly where documents are, and what they contain. For the majority of the Web’s content, they are fumbling around in the dark.
At the same time, the way we use the Internet is about to undergo a massive change. Soon we’ll not just be using computer terminals to surf but also cellphones, televisions and personal organisers. Yet each device requires varying levels of help to show the right information. For instance, you don’t want big graphics downloading on to a cellphone’s tiny screen.
It’s a big problem which requires a big solution. That’s why companies, academics and individuals – even such unnatural bedfellows as IBM, Sun and Microsoft – have got together with the W3C, the Web standards body, in a collaboration that could transform the Internet experience.
XML is set to steal the limelight from HTML, the Net’s current lingua franca. While HTML is easy to learn, and does well what it was intended to do – present information – it is being asked to handle information on a massive scale.
HTML isn’t up to the job. It simply tells your Web browser how text and graphics should be displayed on your screen. But it doesn’t tell your browser what that data means. That is why search engines have to work so hard. It’s difficult to catalogue data if you don’t know what it is. XML will tell your browser what, for instance, a number represents – a price, a name, a discount or a measurement.
For Doug Tidwell, “cyber evangelist” for IBM’s developerWorks XML team, it is the latest step in a evolutionary process for the Internet.
“IBM sees XML as the final piece of the e-business puzzle,” says Tidwell. “XML makes data intelligent. An XML document contains the same data that might appear on a printed document or an HTML page. But it also contains metadata – information about information. It explains how the different pieces of information relate to each other.
“Armed with the data and the metadata, that information can be processed intelligently at any point in a network – on the server, in a browser, in a cellphone.”
An XML tag will tell a browser that an item is an image – a PC browser will then display the image, while a cellphone browser will automatically ignore it. XML will also make it much easier for companies, which perhaps use incompatible computers, to share information.
Moving to XML takes some preparation. The data descriptions – the metadata the companies will use – have to be hammered out. But, says Tidwell, it should be worth the effort: “Once the XML document types have been defined, and various companies can export and import data into this common format, they can focus on things that are more important to their businesses. They don’t have to change their database systems, business objects or anything else in their IT shops.
“Even better, if another supplier or customer joins the fray, they don’t have to do anything special to work with them. They simply require the new partner to use the same document types everybody else in the industry is using.”
The standard is already picking up high profile converts. Last year, search engine Excite announced that it was preparing for XML.
Commerce is switching over too. The computer giant Dell last month completed the mammoth task of converting its website to XML, at the same time as carrying out a redesign.
Putting XML into the site made perfect sense says Barry Collins, Internet business manager for Dell United Kingdom and Ireland. “XML will make it possible for the site to be optimised for different devices like cellphones using wireless application protocol, digital TVs and things like that.
“The importance for Dell is that XML has allowed us to take a very big thing – our Web presence – and add a lot more structure to it than was available before. From a technology point of view, its back end is a lot more structured. When that is structured, that allows us to offer a lot more customisation.”
And that could prove a whole lot more useful than any number of flashy bells and whistles.
ENDS