B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

158 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
based on the nature of the application. It is not possible to extend the
data set on which HTML is based to create new tags that are meaningful,
useful and necessary for applications. Only the W3C (World Wide Web
Consortium) can extend the data set for HTML. Thus, HTML only
describes documents of a single type.
Data is hard to process
HTML data is hard to process. Browsers permit several syntactical and
structural errors of HTML to pass, unchecked. It is not possible to
extract any meaningful, structured information from an HTML document.
Apart from this, HTML documents can only be divided into a head and
a body. So, there can be no logical break up of information in the
document. For example, it is not possible for a browser to request only
a specific user information section from an HTML document that
contains information about many users. The browser can request and
present only the whole document.
6.4. XML: The Universal Language of
Data Interchange
XML is the 'universal language of data interchange' as far as the
exchange of data among diverse applications written in any language
and running on heterogeneous platforms is concerned. The use of XML
makes it fairly easy for applications to exchange, interpret and act on
data. XML fully leverages Internet, as XML-based messages can be
exchanged over the Internet using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
or HTTPS (SSL — Secured Sockets Layer HTTP).
XML provides an efficient means of separating the data and structure
from documents representing business processes. Based on these virtues,
XML promises to enable the development of B2B e-commerce applications
that are purely data-driven. The potential impact is significant: XML
compliant application servers, Web servers, internal legacy applications,
ERP systems and external applications can all quickly make their information
available in a simple and usable format.
Since XML is both universal and flexible, it has become one of the
most powerful components of B2Bi, enabling systems to share data and