Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an extremely simple dialect of SGML which is completely described in this document. The goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. For this reason, XML has been designed for ease of implementation, and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML. Note on status of this document: This is even more of a moving target than the typical W3C working draft. Several important decisions on the details of XML are still outstanding members of the W3C SGML Working Group will recognize these areas of particular volatility in the spec, but those who are not intimately familiar with the deliberative process should be careful to avoid actions based on the content of this document, until the notice you are now reading has been removed.
With the release of Chem4Word (sorry Chemistry Add-in for Word) we've reached an important milestone in the development of CML. CML is about 16 years old (Henry will give a better estimate – but I think we can reasonably date it from our trip to WWW1 and henry's subsequent trip to WWW2). I think it's reasonably come of age and can now be regarded as the de facto approach to representing semantic chemistry.
Extensible Markup Language (XML for short) is being designed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium; the larger goal of this effort is ''to enable future Web user agents to receive and process generic SGML in the way that they are now able to receive and process HTML. As in the case of HTML, the implementation of SGML on the Web will require attention not just to structure and content (the domain of SGML per se) but also to link semantics and display semantics.''(1) As a subgoal, we are creating an SGML application profile, XML, that is designed to provide many of the benefits of SGML in a lightweight, easy-to-use, easy-to-implement dialect that omits many of the difficult or problematic features of the full standard. This paper is an interim report on the progress of the work on creating an XML specification. This work is proceeding vapidly and we anticipate a draft of the specification being available at the time of SGML'96.
“Legislating Market Winners” argues that certain enacted digital signature laws are premised upon false assumptions, and inappropriately enshrine a business model which would not evolve naturally in the marketplace. In attempting to solve an unsolvable liability allocation problem, such legislation harms consumers and the future evolution of electronic commerce. The article points out that alternative business models can solve the liability allocation problem. Despite obvious flaws, legislation of this type continues to be proposed, partly because the infrastructure created by these laws coincides with the needs of key escrow proponents. Ultimately the article argues that digital signature laws, which impose a particular view of electronic commerce, should be abandoned, in favor of laws which remove specific, well-defined barriers to electronic commerce and which allow the electronic commerce marketplace to evolve unfettered.
The advertiser-supported Web site is one of several business models vying for legitimacy in the emerging medium of the World Wide Web on the Internet (Hoffman, Novak, and Chatterjee 1995). Currently, there are three major types of advertiser-supported sites: 1) sponsored content sites like Hotwired, ESPNET Sportszone, and ZD Net, 2) sponsored search agents and directories like InfoSeek, Excite, and Yahoo, and 3) entry portal sites like Netscape. At present, these three classes of sites are split at about 55 percent, 36 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in terms of advertising revenue (Jupiter Communications 1996).
