B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

166 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
ordered, they can be compressed fairly well, thereby increasing
performance. In fact, the compression of XML documents is much
better than a standard text document as the latter is usually less structured.
Rapid adoption by industry
IBM, Microsoft, Sun, SAP, HP and many companies are supporting
XML. XML is being rapidly adopted by all companies, big or small, in
all the sectors of the economy, making it the de facto standard for
exchanging data over the Internet.
6.4.6. XML limitations
In this section, we will discuss some of the major limitations of XML.
XML messages can be very large
XML messages can be as large as 5 to 10 times their equivalent EDI
messages, making it much slower than EDI. Such a large flow of data
over the Internet uses up a lot of network bandwidth and slows the
whole process down. For large companies that have fixed relationships
and high volume of transactions, EDI is still a better way of handling
those connections. XML, on the other hand, can be used for seeking
any-to-any connectivity.
Different standards
Several organizations and companies are promoting their own flavors of
XML standards. This adds to a lot of confusion in the marketplace
about the interoperability issues. XML is also just an evolving technology
and there are several pieces that are still being developed.
Limited semantic interpretation
For two companies to be able to exchange XML-based data, they need
to explicitly agree upon the semantics of the document such as the