B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 163
• add editing comments to an XML file;
• have faster searches and retrieval of documents, as it is easier to
arrange XML into an indexed repository; and
• Identify the location and format of illustrations in a text document.
It is important to note, however, that XML is not:
• A predefined set of tags that can be used to markup documents; or
• A standardized template for producing particular types of text
documents.
6.4.5. XML strengths
In this section, we will discuss the strengths of XML.
Powerful meta-language
Being a derivative of SGML, XML supports development of new
markup languages for vertical industries and business domains. The
XML language consists of rules that anyone can follow to create a
markup language. Some of the examples include Fpml (Financial Products
Markup Language), cXML (Commerce Extensible Markup Language).
The rules ensure that a single compact program, the parser, can process
all these new languages. XML can integrate multiple files (with structured
data and unstructured data) into a single compound document. Example
of structured data are legacy files or relational database, unstructured
data can be text documents, graphics and images, audio and video
resources and Web pages.
Allows semantic agreement between trading partners
XML enables the creation of semantic agreement among companies
exchanging XML documents by providing a mapping, transformations
and cross-references in that document. Through an XML workflow,
which can be distributed to all the trading partners or can be on a perpartner
basis, companies can also define the processing of this XML
document by identifying activities, processes and tasks.