David, Thanks again for bringing a note of sanity into this discussion. I personally suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Many people are trying to implement EDI in XML and are failing. They are very different paradigms -- EDI assumes a common standard and then has to live with the deviations from that standard. XML makes no real assumptions about standards; one of the real reasons the repositories never took off was that the boundary of the problem space was not syntactical but semantic -- people have different uses for XML, and this the object descriptions are going to change from one user to the next. That's a given. The solution to the EDI dilemma is to basically jettison the move toward a common interface ... it won't happen, it won't stick if it did happen .. and concentrate instead upon building translation software (XSLT) at the entry and egress points that can be targeted to a specific client. So long as you have some mechanism for identifying the namespace origin of the document being received, you have a key to decoding the document. A transformation is an easy document to write,and both companies benefit by developing it together. Concerning the responsibility of XML B2B hype in the current economy's downturn, I think you'd be fooling yourself if you honestly believed that the two are in any way related, other than from the standpoint that a lot of companies looked before they leaped in terms of XML solutions. The XML standard is only a few years, XSLT celebrated its first anniversary last month, and schema is still weeks from being made a formal Recommendation. EDI didn't emerge overnight, but took place over several years with all of the attendant problems of any new technology. The collapse of the market is due more to the end of the HTML era -- people have pushed HTML about as far as it will go, and they've discovered it lacking for being a common business interchange language. It's also due to the fact that no market can continue to grow forever -- growth consumes resources and invades economic niches. In any large system, there are ebb times that occur as consolidation takes place, overstretched companies become scattered or broken, and money from investments is reined back in. Having said that, I think that there are some real problems with the economic situation right now. We have lost sight of the fact that markets exist to solve the needs of the customer, not the needs of the stockholder. Most investors know almost nothing about what they are really investing in, only that it looks like it might be a good return on their investments. They care nothing about whether the company they are investing in will actually do something good and useful -- they only want to know how much money they can make investing in your company. In the B2B sector, this has muddied the water further, as all of these companies that were losing money in the consumer sphere reorged and started calling themselves B2B service providers in order to attrack the investors. One of the casualties of this has come in the form of distrust between the old guard EDI developers who basically want to see a solution implemented that retains the salient feature of EDI (or better yet, just uses EDI outright) and the XML newbies who see XML/EDI as a way to get their company back into the black, who do have a different perspective (XSLT is important here) and yet who feel that the EDI folk are just trying to bury the new technology by pointing to all of its flaws. The reason that XML has become so big in the B2B sphere is because EDI isn't working -- its hitting 20% of the larger companies and leaving the small vendors (and the cutomizer) holding the bill. EDI is more efficient, and the capital investment in EDI makes leaving it for the uncharted shoals of XML a risky proposition at best. But the smaller companies will be investing heavily in it, creating a noticeable divide in technology between the largest core companies working with EDI and the smaller ones handling XML. -- Kurt Cagle -- Author, XML Developers Handbook ----- Original Message ----- From: "David RR Webber" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 4:30 PM Subject: CORRECTION [AGAIN!] RE: The XML for EDI has no Clothes! And I say AGAIN what you are describing is NOT the XML/edi approach. What you are describing is doing EDI using XML tags. No surprises that replacing one veneer with another leaves the old problems unchanged. Please stop confusing XML-EDI for XML/edi and the completely different paradigm that this brings. DW. =================================================== Message text written by "Steve L. Bollinger" > At 09:21 AM 1/31/2001 -0500, Scott Meade wrote: Wal-Mart will still be saying, "It's our way or the highway!". That is exactly correct! the differences between trading partnerships will still exist in XML the same as X12 and that is what is so labor intensive and costly to the SMEs. Steve At 09:21 AM 1/31/2001 -0500, Scott Meade wrote: >Thank you Steve. I have been working in EDI for 12 years now and I am now >learning XML, because of all the hype of XML replacing traditional EDI. As >a consultant I have worked with major Corporations and smaller ones, so I >know the EDI frustrations of being able to dictate, and being dictated to, >what is sent and received. Now getting into XML I could not see what all >the hype was about. I did not see any ease of use. Instead of segment now >its tags. The real headaches will still be there. Wal-Mart will still be >saying, "It's our way or the highway!". While someone will say "no use >this tag or that tag". Anyway, thank you. I was starting to feel as if I >was missing the big picture. > >Scott T. Meade < ------ XML/edi Group Discussion List ------ Homepage =http://www.XMLedi-Group.org Unsubscribe =send email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Leave the subject and body of the message blank Questions/requests: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To receive only one message per day (digest format) send the following message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], (leave the subject line blank) digest xmledi-group your-email-address To join the XML/edi Group complete the form located at: http://www.xmledi-group.org/xmledigroup/mail1.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Plan on attending the upcoming meeting during DISA's conference: http://www.disa.org/conference/annual_conf/index.htm ------ XML/edi Group Discussion List ------ Homepage = http://www.XMLedi-Group.org Unsubscribe = send email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Leave the subject and body of the message blank Questions/requests: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To receive only one message per day (digest format) send the following message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], (leave the subject line blank) digest xmledi-group your-email-address To join the XML/edi Group complete the form located at: http://www.xmledi-group.org/xmledigroup/mail1.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Plan on attending the upcoming meeting during DISA's conference: http://www.disa.org/conference/annual_conf/index.htm
