The alphabet soup of tech-world abbreviations can fry anyone's brain. It's called XML, which stands for extensible mark-up language, and this is a progress report. When I first wrote about it some 15 months ago I was absolutely jazzed by the possibilities. I'm still optimistic, but reality is always more daunting than dreams. It's easier to describe the effect.
Entire industries are likely to come up with XML standards just for their own special needs.
Take shoe manufacturers. Bosak says they might get together and define an XML-based solution for exchanging data on shoes, where the important information would include length, width, color, style, etc. That may sound obvious, but it isn't. Digital information is just a bunch of zeroes and ones, and it gets zapped around the Internet using a standard called Internet Protocol. But that's just the beginning, not the conclusion.