ABSTRACT

Information technology changes on a daily basis, and almost every year the world is presented with a new “holy grail” of the information age. Into this fray comes the extensible Markup Language (XML), one of our newest Holy Grails that promises everlasting life, or least ever-usable data. At its heart is a simple text-based language that can describe complex data structures. Because of its simplicity, almost any computer has the power to use XML and almost every type of network can transmit it. XML has also received very broad support from almost all the major vendors and many of the smaller ones, allowing almost any computer system to manipulate XML without major modifications to the existing infrastructure. So what are the problems?