What's made the business use of the Internet explode has been the widespread adoption of a new standard, XML, to describe the information. HTML - Hyper-Text Mark-up Language - is what it says, a set of rules for handling text, such as "here's a group of characters; place them here on the screen, make them bold and color them red." But it doesn't know or care what the text means, and the functionality you can build into an HTML-based applications has been pretty limited.

On the other hand, XML - eXtensible Mark-up Language - describes each part of the character string itself: "here's a part number," "here's a price," "here's a MTD total." And that lets systems parse an incoming XML document and extract certain data for action by other systems, or display different elements in different ways for different users.

Earlier data communications schemes, from the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standard used by major enterprises (reservations systems, the automotive and aerospace industries) to the interface between the PMS and POS systems in your hotel were supposed to do this, but they're complex, hard to implement and required re-writes whenever any data element changed. For example, if the fifth through seventh characters in a line of text are defined as a 3-digit part number, and you then need to handle a 4-digit number, the definition of those characters has to be changed as well as every single one following them.

XML avoids that completely, making data exchange simpler, more flexible and more powerful. As it becomes more widespread and new systems are designed around it, it becomes more important than ever for your systems to be able to handle it, even if you have a significant investment in the existing communications formats. Sabre is a good example; although it's a quintessential user of EDI for GDS communications, it's also adding XML to allow it to link in more effectively to new partners' systems.

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