tensible Markup Language can be used to automatically reformat a document to feed to many different publishing media, thus eliminating the need for redundant data storage in the process! This is incredibly powerful stuff!IBM is in the process of developing and strongly supporting Extensible Markup Language. IBM sees this language as a strategic technology for spreading electronic business across different computing platforms, much as the JAVA software environment does. In fact, the JAVA environment and the Extensible Markup Language environments are extremely complementary. JAVA, however, only allows the creator to generate platform-independent applications. The use of the Extensible Markup Language enables the manipulation of platform-independent data. In combination with the Internet, which enables platform-independent networking, they provide the three prerequisites for universal computing: global communications, portable software, and portable data. The easiest way to explain Extensible Markup Language is that it is a way of tagging any kind of data to make its significance understandable even to the computers. A human may be able to tell the difference between a subtotal and a total of an invoice, say. Or, the human can easily tell the difference between a billing address as opposed to a shipping address, or a retail price vs. a sale price, because the human has logic “built in.” The computers and software, however, need additional information in order to tell the differences between the data elements. It is apparent that Extensible Markup Language’s strength and usefulness will be to benefit the computers in the future: “The most important application for Extensible Markup Language in the years to come will be computer-to-computer communications instead of computer-to-human or human-to-human communications. It is all about exchanging data.”- Simon Phipps, IBM’s chief Jav...
