The name of this forum has apparently changed, making it difficult to reply to some postings.
In my reseaching XML and related technologies, I see two areas where it can be a tremendous benefit: (1)Data exchange between different systems or companies with different systems, and (2)Dynamic presentation generation using XSL.
If your company and a busines partner or customer want to automate order processing, billing, etc., but don't know anything about each other's systems, you can simply agree to exchange data using XML. Once you agree upon the schema of the documents and the method of transfer (HTTP, FTP, email attachment), then all you need is a way to process the XML documents (or generate them). Now you can exchange data all you want without regard to what type of database your customer is using. They can even change their database vendor, and since you are simply exchanging XML, nothing you have written has to change.
XML also is very powerful when it comes to dynamic content generation. My company (or rather my marketing department) is big on branding portions of our web site for partners or large customers. With CGI scripts or static HTML files, this is an administration nightmare. It also limits just how much you can customize the pages.
Using if our content is in XML, we can dynamically generate the required HTML by selecting which XSL stylesheet to use (based on URL parameters, etc). The custom pages can look *entirely* different from one another, even though the content is the same. Change something in your XML file, and all your clients see it immediately. This can be extended even further, to support differnt types of content type. For example, if you are using XML and XSL, making your web site WAP enabled is simply creating a new style sheet that returns WAP/WML to the client, from your XML document.
Hope this helps,
Bill
