With an eye toward securing the standards employed in its product line, IntraNet Solutions® Inc.
Tuesday joined the Organization for
Structured Information Standards.
OASIS, the world’s largest Extensible Markup Language (XML) interoperability
consortium, fights for industry standards to make it easier for firms to
conduct business online.
Essentially, it lobbies for businesses to use XML, a common Web language, in
formats that can be shared and accessed across applications. Why XML as
opposed to HTML? The latter is a set language while the former allows
designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition,
transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications
and between organizations.
In contrast to HTML, which describes document structure and visual
presentation, XML describes data in a human readable format with no
indication of how the data is to be displayed. Since XML is truly
extensible, rather than a fixed set of elements like HTML, use of XML will
eventually eliminate the need for browser developers and middleware tools to
add special HTML tags.
However, whether XML eventually supplants HTML as the standard Web
formatting specification depends a lot on whether it is supported by future
Web browsers.
With more than 140 organizational members, members of OASIS are
The move makes a world of sense for IntraNet Solutions, whose No. 1
product, Xpedio Web content management system is a flexible application for
dot-coms.
The tool converts content from desktop applications and other business
sources to Web formats including XML, PDF, HTML or WML, with advanced
security. Xpedio has been configured to particular XML standards adopted by
various industries — healthcare, high technology and financial, by creating
style sheets and other technologies specific to those industries.
“OASIS is the most active XML forum operating today, which will help us be
involved in leading the creation of new XML standards and incorporating them
into our products, ultimately enabling our customers to take full advantage
of technology gains.” said Dan Ryan, vice president of marketing and
business development for IntraNet Solutions.
Essentially, the development of XML standards can only make the firm’s
Xpedio Web content management system better.
organizations and individuals that provide, use and specialize in the
implementation of the technologies that make these standards work in
practice. OASIS’ board of directors consists of technology directors from
the likes of Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM Corp.
