Summary


XML is well on its way to becoming ubiquitous. XML is highly likely to become more common, more important, and more stable than HTML, and it will rival ASCII as a foundational technology.

XML's strengths lie in its stability (few changes are even contemplated at this point, and no one has the leverage to make proprietary extensions to it); its flexibility (it handles documents, transactions, and behavior); its self-disclosing structure (it either describes or points one to a description of the meaning of its tags); its expressiveness (it maintains complex structures such as bills of materials in their native format); and its neutrality (it has allegiance to no particular company).

XML's only real downsides are verbosity and roundtrip throughput. An XML transaction may be three to five times the size of a traditional transaction. The fact that this message not only has to be transported over the network, but also must be parsed and marshaled at each end, leads to a total end-to-end performance penalty of almost tenfold. However, just as the performance penalty of relational databases was overcome in the 1980s, the performance penalty of XML will be overcome—partly through technology and partly as companies come to accept the penalty because the flexibility is worth so much more than raw performance.

The rest of this book concerns important semantic initiatives that are partially or completely dependent on XML: enterprise application integration, Web Services, and the Semantic Web.




Semantics in Business Systems(c) The Savvy Manager's Guide
Semantics in Business Systems: The Savvy Managers Guide (The Savvy Managers Guides)
ISBN: 1558609172
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 184
Authors: Dave McComb

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