XML on the Web or in messages Over the next year or two, more and more data that you will come across in the normal course of your business will be in XML format. This dialect of HTML in well-formed XML syntax is becoming fairly common on the Internet. Web sites published in other XML formats. EI and B2B software tends to use XML to exchange data between applications and business partners. The biggest vendors, especially Microsoft, have shown a clear commitment to accelerate this trend by saving data in XML format.
Tools are available that produce XML data from online forms that ordinary users can easily fill out.
See the offerings from icomXpress and JetForm . As all the companies that have jumped on the XML bandwagon actually implement XML support in their products, it will be increasingly common to be able to simply export data from existing tools in XML format. ERP and other enterprise-level systems are increasingly supporting XML as an output format. Software design tools such as Rational Rose are supporting the UMI XML format for exchange of UML diagrams, rules, etc. Converting XML Finally, a number of specialized tools are being designed to easily convert data in conventional databases and flat files into XML syntax.