Word: tenenbaum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...broken, but don't worry--Marty Tenenbaum knows how to fix it. Tenenbaum is chairman of CommerceNet, a nonprofit organization based in Palo Alto, Calif., and devoted, unsurprisingly, to promoting commerce on the Net. And his silver bullet, an obscure design language called XML, is about to transform cyberspace...
Really. "This is the most important thing that will happen to the Web next year," says Bob Glushko, Tenenbaum's point man on XML and director of CommerceNet's for-profit spinoff, CNGroup. "XML," says Eckart Walther, product manager for browser leader Netscape, which, along with archrival Microsoft, has already climbed aboard the XML bandwagon, "is going to be as big as the Web itself...
Into this software cacophony strides XML (short for extensible markup language). "It's essential that all these systems talk to each other," says Tenenbaum, "and they can't today, except at the level of HTML." The Web's original markup language made it easy for humans to read Websites; XML makes it easy for machines to read them. Think of XML as doing for the Web what Windows and the Mac did for personal computers. When you click on a document on a Windows-based PC, the operating system is smart enough to recognize that you've selected a word...
...Tenenbaum--a longtime proselytizer for online commerce, whose Enterprise Integration Technologies developed much of the technology that makes Web transactions possible--believes that XML offers nothing less than "the real possibility of fundamentally restructuring the way a given industry works." If you can get everyone in, say, the real estate business--the brokers, the escrow agents, the mortgage banks--to adopt XML, says Tenenbaum, "you really can start to think about changing the rules: paperless closings, real-time mortgage bidding...