Now a lot of people are noticing. Here's an explanation of why XML was built, what it looks like and how it can be put to practical use on your intranet. It provides what's needed to make intranet applications run smarter and faster. On an intranet, XML will enable two capabilities notably absent from today's Web technology. XML will make intranet data much easier to manage, because it will be much richer and more self-describing.
Web technology is great because it's easy.
Users don't need any training in how to make it go, and information providers can get Web-based applications running on intranets in no time. But Web technology also is a pain, because it's stupid and slow. It's stupid because it turns a powerful desktop PC into a dumb batch terminal. It's slow because to get any work done you have to send a batch of information across the network to the server and then back to your desktop. These problems can be solved by downloading some of the processing work to the fast PC sitting in front of the user.