Andreessen on XML (InfoWorld)

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

>From today's Infoworld, full interview is at:

http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?/interviews/980615andreessen.htm

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Andreessen: In some cases, you just put new standards 
on top of EDI. XML [Extensible Markup Language] is 
going to be important because it gives you ways of 
describing things like patient records and invoices 
for health care services and a whole series of things 
like that. Some of those will be EDI forms, but more 
likely, a lot of them will be tagged XML documents or 
formats. XML is an enabler that gives you a consistent 
way to tag data. So you need to build software systems 
to support that.

InfoWorld: Microsoft has pretty aggressively embraced 
XML. Do you worry about it gaining an edge in this 
technology?

Andreessen: No more than usual. With the open source 
code release on the client side, there are some XML 
parts in there now. And the XML working group in the 
W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] has -- because the 
Navigator source code is available -- decided Navigator 
should be the delivery vehicle for the reference 
implementation of XML. So they're putting the reference 
implementation of XML out of the working group into 
the Navigator source code themselves. The focus now 
is on the client side, but there is work that needs 
to be done on the server side, too.

InfoWorld: Such as what?

Andreessen: We need to start giving people the ability 
to express transactions and transaction records tied
to XML documents. So there's a set of capabilities to 
provide there, and then we need to start looking at the
different vertical spaces.
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"Reference implementation of XML"???  Does anyone have
any idea *what* he is talking about?  (Does *he*?)

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  (jeremy at omsys.com)  http://www.omsys.com/

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