In addition, XML is enabling a new generation of Web-based applications for viewing and manipulating data. The power and beauty of XML comes from its maintaining the separation of the user interface from the structured data. An XML tag can indicate that the data associated with the tag is a retail price, a sales tax, a book title, an amount of precipitation, or any other desired data. As XML tags are adopted by organizations for their intranets, and by others across the Internet, the ability to search for and manipulate data, regardless of the applications within which the data resides, will increase. Once the data is on the client desktop, it can be manipulated, edited, and presented in multiple views without return trips to the server.
Servers can now become more scalable, due to lower computational and bandwidth loads.
Also, because data is exchanged in the XML format, it can be easily merged from different sources. For more information about XML and its uses, see the Why XML paper on the MSDN Online Web Workshop Web site. While implementations tightly coupled to specific component technologies are perfectly acceptable in a controlled environment, they become impractical on the Web. As the set of participants in an integrated business process changes, and as technology changes over time, it becomes very difficult to guarantee a single, unified infrastructure among all participants. Any system supporting these Web standards will be able to support Web services.