The historical tradition of software development required us all to look around for standard protocols, data formats, etc., and pick the ones that hopefully offered the biggest upside and the smallest downside.  It amounted to looking for the fastest train and hopping on.  Sometimes the train arrived at a dead-end.  Often, actually.  But, fortunately, that's history.  The standards guessing game is's history.  The standards guessing game is over.  The standards to adhere to are clear.  They are those espoused and supported by the world wide web consortium.  They are, without exception, like TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML, designed to allow users the world over, regardless of their disparate systems, to communicate and share information.  Collectively, they make the Internet work.  They make the Internet what it is.

These days, when a company develops what they assert is a superior protocol, format or other such standard, the procedure is clear.  They submit it as an open application to the W3 organization.  If and when it emerges from the W3 organization as a full-blown standard, it will be anything but a proprietary component which is a risk.  It will be a freely available, mature, refined standard which has passed many tests of universal operability and acceptance. 

Looking ahead, the worthy successor to HTML is  XML - Extensible Markup Language.

XML is a system for defining, validating, and sharing document formats on the web, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML is primarily intended to meet the requirements of large-scale web content providers for industry-specific markup, vendor-neutral data exchange, one-on-one marketing, workflow management in collaborative authoring environments, ancollaborative authoring environments, and the processing of web documents by intelligent clients.

XML is designed to be a better HTML than HTML can be.  HTML is designed for presentation.  XML is designed for data exchange and the subsequent presentation of that data.  The primary emphasis of XML is the representation of documents which are data-enabled.  But its inherent tree structure and sophisticated support for element composition and attributes makes it a capable data definition language as well.   The extension of ViewTouch in its embrace of XML will be more concerned with XML as a data definition language.

Like HTML, XML documents are text-based, web-accessible containers which take advantage of the underlying protocol layers for transport, reliability and security. However, besides expanding on HTML's ability to format and publish information for display, XML has been designed for extensibility.  It can be used to develop data structures of arbitrary complexity; document databases and push channels all can be defined using XML.

For the XML exchange of documents, the primary tools needed are an intelligent viewer or browser that supports style sheets and an intelligent XML editor that can guide the editing process according to a document type definition [DTD] and help develop style sheets. 

We are already using XML-enabled browsers that satisfy the browser requirement.  The editor which we currently use, XEMACS, has a PSGML mode which allows editing of XML documents.

The next issue is the data format issue itself.  A group of vendors, including Rational Software and IBM, is pushing XMI, the XML Metadata  Interchange Format (as well as SMIF, an XML language for modeling metadata), through the Object  Management Group. Separately, a group of developers is working on UxF, a lightweight format for UML exchange.   There are many other XML-based data-exchange formats in development, such as Extensible Forms Definition Language (XFDL); Web Interface Definition Language (WIDL); XML Remote Procedure Calls (XML-RPC); and a language for expressing data schemas in XML (XML-Data). 

Next is the Style Sheet component of XML.  The SGMLTools project uses James Clark's SGMLS parser and the Jade DSSSL processor to generate pages in multiple formats for the Linux Documentation Project.   XML has a style sheet language, the Extensible Style Sheet Language, or XSL.  The Cascading Style Sheet specification supports XML and HTML.

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a W3 standard which guides us on how to automate the communication of data between users. By defiation of data between users. By definition, an XML document is self-describing and self-validating, as XML's DTDs (Document Type Descriptions) provide the specific type of information needed to parse the enclosed information. By describing XML data with Class and subClassOf tags, the RDF provides the mechanism to map the data directly to an object-oriented language such as C++ .

There are, of course, other programming issues, which I won't yet address.

It is within the reach of XML-browsers, parsers, and style sheet processors to locate the ViewTouch DTDs, entities, etc. which will have to be based on public identifiers. Perhaps the SGML Open Catalog spec can be used, but there is a draft proposal for an XCatalog subset specialized for XML. Protocols and standards for supporting catalogs in Linux are important for XML development.  Unfortunately, catalogs have no official standing in current XML standards, but with the XCatalog work in progress, this is likely to change. Some parsers already support XCatalogs, such as Lars Garshol's xmproc, which is part of the Python XML package. 

XML and Object Oriented Databases:   XML makes use of `tags' to describe data types.   It could be seen as the perfect match for similarly enabled ODBMSes.  XML has the ability to define `meta data', or intelligence about the kind of data r intelligence about the kind of data residing in OODB's, should help make ODBMSes a major tool for taming complex Web sites and moving important corporate data to the Web.

Two ODBMS vendors in particular -- Object Design and POET Software -- have moved very quickly to integrate XML into their products.

Object Design's eXcelon, which uses XML as its native document format, is being positioned as a mid-tier server that can bridge the XML-based worlds of the Web and traditional databases. The product has just begun shipping.

POET's Content Management Suite, which is viewed as a Web-based server for technical and other complex documentation, works in conjunction with the company's Object Server 5.0 to manage the transfer of XML objects around the network.

XML will have little effect on the object market until various industries can agree upon their respective Document Type Definitions (DTDs), a crucial value that describes how tags in XML documents should be interpreted.

One primary goal of the ViewTouch XML extension will be to enable it to share back-end enterprise data with other applications in real-time.
The information from the database and application must be transformable to XML-tagged files. The resultant  "metadata"  (information about information) will enable (information about information) will enable accurate and fast Web searches. 

XML will simplify information exchange between businesses.  What started as a better way to build a Web page is poised to become the definitive method to integrate data sources. XML lets suppliers and businesses pass information between applications using agreed sets of data definitions.  It is one of the fundamental building blocks of the future application development environment.

XML will make data available to Web browsers.  The XML server application which we will build will pull data from many sources, including our own, then formats the data in XML, transform the XML into Web pages, and serve the pages to browsers.
Users will get data from multiple sources in one interface and developers don't have to alter legacy applications or reformat data.

XML can be used to distribute news and financial data to desktop.  XML gives us as developers the freedom to create our own markup language for documents that puts data into context and also makes for much easier searching.