In such a world, display based technologies such as HTML are increasingly dysfunctional. Not every bank or shipping company in the world is going to be able to publish its display formats and program for everyone else s formats. The complexity becomes overwhelming. Automated translation of one data format into a different data format is difficult, when only display format information is present. Trying to make screen-scraping techniques work with new applications has proven to be a mess.
Maintenance becomes a major problem.
The wave of the future will be application designs that can exchange self-describing data and forms. It provides a completely self-describing format of the data or message being sent or received. E-commerce and Web applications using XML are just beginning to appear. Web Server-based ASP technology can be used to easily generate XML output, and process incoming XML input. XML can be used to mediate between Database row-based output, asynchronous message records, and other types of business forms and data.