Right on Kurt! Yours is one of the few contributions to this thread that is "thinking
outside the box." The introduction of every new technology, that is, "way of doing
things" has extended repercussions on the way things have been done in the past and on
the pattern of economic interests. It is almost a certainty that arguments favoring a
new technology over an older technology will fail to win adherents when the battle is
waged on the older technology's turf. The more important point is what new things
does the new technolology allow you to do that you couldn't have done (or done only
with great difficulty) with the older technology. Remember, the older technology
arose as the solution to a business problem involving a goal and constraints, both of
which may have changed.
Using XML for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a case in point. In the early
1970's, when EDI standards making began, the goal was to transmit specific business
documents such as purchase orders from one business to another (ideally from one
computer to another). This had to occur over wires with limited capacity and over
networks owned by services that charged by the bit. The solution was to develop sets
of standard messages, each of which corresponded to a particular business object such
as a purchase order. Both parties had to use exactly the same standards (or subset of
the standards) in order to communicate. The idea was to send the data in as brief a
form as possible with minimal "control characters." In other words, the characters
that you needed to make sense out of the data were a necessary evil. You needed these
characters to make sense out of the data you were receiving, but they added to the
cost of data transmission.
Over the last 30 years some things have stayed the same, but others have changed. The
goal of moving data between computers has stayed the same, but it has become
increasingly evident that what businesses want to do is transmit data, not business
documents containing data, from one to another. Steve Bollinger touched on this when
he wrote:
"You can say, wait a minute Steve, in X12 we have a
standard 850 Purchase Order. Oh, do we? There are so many "optional" segments and
elements that different Trading Partners agree they must use in varying combinations,
we are back in the non-standard soup
again. RosettaNet tried to "solve" this by making most of their fields mandantory
(sic). Then when partners had no use for a field they put in "XXXXXX"
just to fill it. What a mess."
There have also been changes in the technical and economic constraints. The
capacities of "the wires" have increased allowing transmission of a greater volume of
data per second. Facilitating this is data-compression technology. Also, Value added
networks are switching to flat rates to compete with internet service providers.
These changes allow businesses not only to send data to one another, but also to send
the definitions of the data, the meta-data, as well; and to use plain English (French,
German, Chinese, Japanese,...) instead of arcane code.
In this new, Web-based environment, it makes sense to use XML to do some new things
that better address the goal and take advantage of the relaxed constraints. For
example: (1) to send meta-data, say, a Document Type Definition (DTD) or XML Schema,
along with data. (or at least to send a reference link to it.) (2) to share data in
new ways such as authorizing parties to "drop by" a Web site and "pick up" the data,
instead of sending the data to each of them. Also, XML along with its allied
technology XSLT, allows translation between XML tag labels that may use different
words or symbols, but mean the same thing. This allows a business or group of
businesses to use a vocabulary for labeling its data that makes sense to it while
translating its terms in order to do business with "outsiders."
I am certain that each of us, if we put our minds to it can think of ways to use XML
to accomplish things we have not been able to accomplish before and not spend our time
trying to replace "EDI" with XML to do the same thing.
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