At the end, the program added up your configuration and gave you a price. You could pay for it online with your credit card. The attraction of XML is that not only can the geniuses at Dell achieve such feats of online transactions, but that everybody in business can do the same. Where Dell's revolutionary style of direct sale over the Web works through custom server routines, XML documents themselves will offer similar automated function. While anything is possible in the dynamic environment of XML, the bottom line is that this is a data delivery system.
Data can be documents and presentations, of course.
But the idea that XML is somehow competing with PDF is just an illusion. The roots of PDF are in the far different soil of mainstream commercial life, and compared to the largely theoretical and philosophical debates surrounding how XML might work in the future, conversations about PDF concern implementation issues shared by tens of millions of Acrobat users. In the world's most demanding digital document management market, in New York advertising and publishing shops, Acrobat PDF is breaking price-performance barriers and providing a competitive edge that no one can ignore. While XML remains in a cranky infancy, Acrobat PDF is a mature, widely adopted presentation format. Tony is a charter member of The Camden Group.