Open Market Inc., a provider of
Internet commerce software, announced its support of the XML family of
languages for its Folio products.
On Dec. 8, 1997, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) advanced XML (eXtensible
Markup Language) as a proposed meta-language standard. Development continues
on the related XSL (eXtensible Style Sheet Language) and XLL (eXtensible
Linking Language) standards.
Cambridge, MA-based Open Market said it will support the development and
adoption of XML as a meta-language standard, and has already embraced XML
for data interchange between the components of its Internet commerce solution.
The company is a member of the W3C and contributor to the W3C XML initiative.
Open Market claims that XML holds promise as a standard way of
describing document structure and exchanging data. XML enables rich
searching, compound document support, and the repurposing of content. XSL
stylesheets will render XML documents distributed via CD-ROM, the Web, or
print.
“XML provides a quantum leap in capabilities for publishers and commercial
enterprises,” said Lawrence Stewart, chief scientist at Open Market.
“Information publishers will be able to distribute documents with all the
richness provided by their authors, no matter what format, and businesses
selling on the Internet will be able to exchange fully functional business
documents such as catalogs, orders, invoices, and payments without using
proprietary formats or requiring the expensive setup of EDI.”
Open Market’s current Folio products enable publishers to distribute
information from a Folio “infobase” to the Internet or to CD-ROM. Folio
products currently provide the means to import HTML, SGML, XML, and popular
word processing documents. With support of XML, the Folio infobase will be
opened to allow documents to be indexed and secured in their native formats.
