Envision a world in which you buy a newhome appliance and it introduces itself toall of your other appliances and they figureout how to work together. Went you startyour movie player it orders the lights todim, the microwave to pop the popcornand the telephone to hold all your callsuntil the movie is over.
This may sound like something out of ascience fiction novel, but it is just aroundthe corner thanks to an extensible markuplanguage called XML. It sounds like yourt-shirt size, but it is a powerful new additionto the e- world and it is going to rock yourworld good.
A relative of HTML, XML promises tobecome the common language for PCs,Macs and any other device that has acomputer chip. The possibilities areendless.
This common language for all devices willmake it possible to have networked carsand offices.
Automobiles that have all the componentstalking to one other and making adjustmentsbased on the data received. Offices whereall the machines, not just computer terminals,will be able to work together in a coordinatedmanner that will make the whole system manytimes more powerful and productive that theindividual machines working alone.XML and the Internet.
The Internet became what it is today becauseHTML was accepted as a universal languagefor displaying images and text. The impact ofXML will first be seen in the great improvementit will bring to search results on search engines.
Today's search engines produce a lot ofirrelevant results. That's because, to a searchengine, a word or phrase is just a pattern of letterswithout meaning. XML will eliminate a lot of this"garbage" search results by labeling contentmore thoroughly.
This may all sound like something out of thedistant future, but it will become our realityin the near future. The most amazing featsresulting from XML are those that we can'teven image yet. The future will be an excitingtime to live and XML will play a large role.
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