Youve just been called into conference with your CEO. Your Name Here, he says, I just came from a board meeting and Johnson from Advanced Financial says his IT guys are using XML for everything, and theyve improved their efficiency by 400 percent. When are we going to get with this XML thing and improve our efficiency? I want a full report by Friday!
Sound familiar? These are the same guys who were demanding that we had to have everything Web based right after their kids told them to sign up for AOL. SureI have a 50 year old flat-file database that was originally designed for sequential access on magnetic tape and I need to have a plan to XMLize it by next week. While Im at it, I might as well design an XML-based STP (straight through processing) system.

Dont Believe the Hype
Everywhere we look these days we see that now familiar acronym, XML. Two years ago on these pages I warned about the over-hyping of XML: It is not the panacea that will solve all of your data processing woes. It makes no sense to mindlessly demand that we use XML in every system. On the other hand, it really is ubiquitous and should not be ignored. Your latest browser supports XML, Microsoft Office is XML-enabled. I have seen many applications that use XML files the way we used to use text-based INI files.
A recent report by ZapThink (www.zapthink.com) states that expenditures on XML technologies in the financial services sector will grow to over $8.3 billion by 2005. Is the insurance industry really going to spend billions on XML? I dont know, but I do know that we are putting the cart before the horse. Lets build and purchase systems that efficiently integrate with our existing systems. Lets make those decisions based on a wide range of criteria, not just on their use of XML.

Believe the Hype
That being said, XML is very, very useful. It will not go away. It shouldnt go away. Our industry will benefit by using XML in two primary arenas: streamlining data acquisition and transfer, and content management and publishing. And thats a pretty good trick for one standard.
So what do you tell your CEO about XML? The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3c.org)the organization that defines standards for most Web-based thingsdefines XML thus: The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web. Gee, thats useful. More succinctly, XML is a tagged meta-language. Meta-language means there is additional information provided about the data thatare represented in a document. Thatadditional informationmetadatais included in the tags.
Everyones familiar with HTML. The tags in HTML adhere to a set of standard meanings (also defined by the W3C). So this:
<B><I>XML is Cool</I></B>
will be correctly interpreted by any Web browser, which will rendered the text as bold and italicized. In XML, on the other hand, I might have something like:
<subhead>XML is Cool</subhead>
By itself, this statement is meaningless as far as data processing is concerned. Interesting enough, it probably has some meaning to most human readersi.e., the phrase XML is cool is intended to be a subhead in some document.
But if we include the above phrase in a XML document that also has a reference to a DTD (document type definition), it will make sense to our data processing system. The DTD will identify subhead as a valid element and will specify what type of data constitutes a subhead.
With this information, our system can then do something meaningful with the phrase. If its a publishing system, it may apply a style sheet to the subhead and render it as bold and italicized. If its a data system, it may insert whatevers between the tags into a specific field in a database. Thats what put the Xextensiblein XML.
Because there are no hard and fast rules regarding the meaning of tags in any particular XML document, those tags can be customized by industry (e.g., ChemXML), company (PruXML), or even individual (PaulXML), and used in a variety of ways depending on the DTD and the system that is interpreting that data.
HTML is restricted to describing the presentation of data (bold, 12 point, etc.); it does so by pre-determined, universal rules. But XML describes the data itself, and its up to the system to determine how to use that data.
Single-Source Publishing
We all have tons of documents that we need to share throughout our organizations. Some of these are updated constantly, and some are set in stone and only change when we undergo a corporate reorganization. Traditionally, policy manuals have been distributed using loose-leaf binders so supplements can be sent out when needed.
We all have a need for central document control and management. The corporate intranet has become the preferred method for distributing documents throughout the organization. A single file, located on a central server, is updated so everyone who needs that document has access to the latest approved version. For documents with extensive formatting and graphics, Adobe PDFs are currently the standard, but other documents are often provided in a wide variety of styles and formatsASCII text, Microsoft Word (pick a version), comma-delimited, and so on. It makes sense to have a standard document format that could be used for publishing across the enterprise. This is where XML fits the bill.
At The National Underwriter Company, we have daily instantaneous news updates available on the Web sites for our weekly newsmagazines (www.nationalunderwriter.com). These are known as our hot news. They are created by editorial staff in Hoboken, N.J., using a simple Web interface and delivered to a server in our Cincinnati office. The format they are saved in is XML.
These documents are then immediately available for our online customers with the XML rendered into HTMLthe formatting is determined by a style sheet. So, for example, the XML would say that a particular phrase is a headline, and the Web style sheet would convert any headline into 14-point bold Arial for display on the Web. If it was going to be printed, our desktop publishing software might convert headlines into 14-point bold Adobe Helvetica.
The idea is that different style sheets can be applied to these XML documents to format them for different audiences or different browsers or even for printing; for example, theyre automatically transformed into daily news update e-mails. Because we are using a simple and extensible format for our data we are able to use it in many different ways.
Every organization can benefit from using similar technologies for in-house publishing. Simple scripts can be written to convert virtually any electronic document to XML. A standard DTD or schema (an XML schema is another way of describing an XML document structure) can be used to identify data types that can then be delivered on demand; the formatting is provided by style sheets designed for the particular end useHTML, QuarkXPress, etc. Storage and organization of documents is also facilitated by having them in a standard format. Most commercial and home-grown document management systems make extensive use of XML.