XML is a superb structured document format standard that businesses are using to exchange business data. XML is an extremely important technology for the Internet and it is destined to become the de-facto standard for structuring document content. Lately the business community is in need of XML due to the arrival of electronic commerce. Here comes the need for XML.

There are a few types of businesses that can be accomplished through the Internet. A business house may sell goods to consumers (Business-to-consumers) or to other businesses (business-to-businesses). Also there are business transactions exclusively between consumers (consumer-to-consumer). Today most of the money changes hands through business-to-business model, because every business needs to conduct inter-business transactions to survive. Manufacturers need to buy parts from suppliers. Resellers need to buy products from manufacturers. All corporations need to buy office supplies and furniture. Geographically distributed companies, conglomerates and even whole industries rely on communication and the ability to distribute manufacturing activities gives some companies an essential economic advantage. XML is to have the largest impact on this sort of business model.

The challenge for businesses to conduct affairs electronically is for businesses to understand each other's data, such as products, customers, and financial data. With a paper-based system, a human being always intervened and could make logical guesses about ambiguous data. With electronic business, however, computer programs need to receive accurate, and structured data. Thus, a structured data document standard is needed that businesses can use to share information. This document standard should be simple enough for anyone to use elegantly, yet be powerful enough to represent any business data. A computer program should be able to read an electronic document structured in this language and figure out the semantic details of the document based on its structure.

Thus XML, as a universal standard for structuring content in electronic documents, is bound to play a very critical role in e-commerce. XML is extensible, enabling businesses to add new structure to their documents as needed. The XML standard does not suffer the version control problems of other markup languages because it does not have predefined tags. Rather, with XML one can define his own tags for his business needs. XML is a meta-markup language because one can define his own markup language which is self-describing. This makes XML the ideal document for transferring business data electronically and it has a wide variety of other applications as well apart from its decisive role in e-business.

1. Providing portable data - Using XML, data is no longer dependent on a specific application for creation, viewing, or editing. Thus XML allows data to be used by any sort of application. This data independence in turn fosters application interoperability, more choice for users and improved information sharing in and between organizations.

2. Compresses very well - Because an XML document can be stored as a flat text file, it gains the advantage of very high compression rates. This makes XML well suited for massive document storage, and it also makes XML useful as an on-the-wire data format.

3. Giving multiple views with one data source - By formatting our data in a markup language, we allow computer applications to process and present this data to us in different ways. More insight into a larger array of data can be obtained by viewing the data in multiple formats. Finally, the processing of data into multiple views is the perfect role for a Java-powered client that receives the XML-formatted data from the server.

4. self-describing - An XML document can contain all the information need for a computer program to interpret it. This makes XML highly useful for communicating data between applications because an application can discover information about a document at run time, without preconceived knowledge of the document's format.

5. Facilitating data searches - Since XML addresses the purpose of data and not just the content, we can drastically improving our ability to find most appropriate information by storing our data on the Web in a rich XML-compliant language or set of languages. Current searches of documents including HTML are simply full or partial keyword matches against the content. An intelligent search engine against a body of XML-compliant markup languages would search both the content and the meta-data, which would drastically improve the accuracy of searches.

6. Increasing relevant and accessible data - The world's databases will able to be encoded in an XML-compliant language and published on the Web. This will open up huge amounts of data to any and all applications interested in processing that data. This increases the opportunities for data mining on a global scale. Consider the vast amounts of information recorded over the holiday season on consumer buying habits via credit card transactions.

7. Facilitating different data formats for various user agents - Similar to presenting different views of data, a single XML-compliant document can be automatically reformatted for different display devices. Data created and viewed one way on a personal computer can also be accessed though in a more appropriate condensed format, on a palmtop computer or personal digital assistant. The same technique can be extended to handicapped people by reformatting the data for the specialized devices that assist them.

8. Making application development simple - Applications will no longer need to import or export hundreds of proprietary binary data formats. This makes application development simpler, which will lead to more competition, better focus on the main functionality of a particular application, and potentially lower costs for consumers due to the increased competition.

9. Becoming the basis for other standards - There are companies that use XML as a foundation for standards in other technologies and industries. For example, WebMethods has defined an interface definition language for the Web using XML, Sun Microsystems has used XML within its EJB and JSP specifications. OpenORB uses XML for configurations. Other famous companies, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, WebMethods, SAP are jumping into the XML bandwagon to utilize XML as the base for designing their own standards for their technologies.

10. XML is human-readable An XML document can be stored as a simple text file, yet it can represent complex business data. If we want to inspect or modify an XML document, we can simply edit the text file. This is a huge benefit over binary data formats that can not be easily viewed or modified, such as serialized Java objects.

Apart from these, XML is simple, easy to use, an open and Internet-standard. XML uses Unicode rather than ASCII. This makes XML highly suitable for international electronic commerce. XML has been blessed with a number of robust tools, such as XML parsers, XML editors, XML browsers, XML servers, XML search engines, XML file utilities, XML-based data bases.

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