See "Goodbye EDI, Hello XML?," by Eric J. Adams, in the Feb. 2000 World Trade Magazine Online, at http://www.worldtrademag.com/story05.html. Adams says "XML may be the electronic document exchange standard that EDI never was," explaining that "XML....[is] also being touted as the Esperanto of digital transactions on and off the web." Why is comparing XML to Esperanto considered to be a convincing argument? So, how many people in the world speak Esperanto? So I learn Esperanto and I can talk to maybe a few dozen other people, usually at their conventions held concurrently with the much better attended Star Trek convocations. If I'm going to go to the trouble to learn a language, I'd like to learn a real one spoken by a hundred million people, like German, or Lord forbid, French - the language of love and GENCOD. Anyway, Adams goes on: Materials, transportation, and warehousing vendors, for example, need real-time, or close-to-real-time, views of inventories to get the right materials to the right place at the right time. In these cases, traditional EDI-style approaches don’t provide enough flexibility or scalability to get the job done. But XML/EDI can get the job done, because the exchanged XML/EDI documents are created on-the-fly, while still adhering to predefined business rules and definitions before being sent on their way. The Internet may be the highway, but XML/EDI is akin to the traffic laws and the messenger services that keep things running smoothly. This one may be too stupid to parse. And aren't EDI messages "created on-the-fly, while still adhering to predefined business rules and definitions before being sent on their way"? William J. Kammerer FORESIGHT Corp. 4950 Blazer Memorial Pkwy. Dublin, OH USA 43017-3305 (614) 791-1600 Visit FORESIGHT Corp. at http://www.foresightcorp.com/ "Commerce for a New World" ======================================================================= To signoff the EDI-L list, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list owner: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/edi-l%40listserv.ucop.edu/
