You can even use different languages for different components, and use the XML to share data between them. Even better, the next generation of web browsers from Microsoft and Netscape supports XML browsing directly, so your users can just point their browsers at an XMLNews-Story article and start reading. The XMLNews specifications are designed to be flexible. News can arrive in many different forms, including text, pictures, sound, video, virtual, three-dimensional worlds, interactive scripts, or just about anything else that news providers can imagine. Since XMLNews-Meta is separate from the news objects themselves, you can use it as a single, common format to provide metadata for anything coming down the wire.
Providers have different requirements for different stories.
When you have to get the news out as fast as possible, XMLNews-Story allows you to send out your news stories with a minimum amount of simple, streamlined markup. When you want to add value to your stories XMLNews-story provides a rich set of inline markup for time and date, organizations, monetary items, people, places, and much more. XMLNews-Meta provides a rich set of properties for exchanging metadata about news objects, and most of the time, those properties will be all that you need. Sometimes, however, news providers and customers have special requirements. XMLNews-Meta is designed so that you can add your own properties whenever you need to, without fear of interfering with existing software or with extensions added by other users up or down the distribution chain.