One of the driving forces behind the growth of the Web has been the simplicity of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) used to build pages.
After a minimum of training, its possible to put up data like there’s no tomorrow. However, this simplicity and inflexibility is also a limitation, and in particular HTML only defines how a page should be displayed and does not help to manage the content, so for many outdated Web sites there really is no tomorrow.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been proposed to address some of these limitations, and is a general purpose language for describing data. It is suitable for transferring data between different applications, databases and systems, and will be a key enabler for many e-commerce applications. XML will enable database information to be more easily used on-line, and make it simpler to link systems automatically.
As with HTML, XML has the advantage of relative simplicity and has quickly amassed a powerful spread of commercial backers. A recent meeting of the Travel Technology Initiative at BT Labs highlighted some of the issues and opportunities.