Abstract This paper discusses the growth of e-commerce and explores the different applications that were developed for use in e-commerce. One of these, XML, is explored in detail, including its development, its advantages over HTML for e-commerce, and the companies that first used it. The paper discusses the advantages of e-commerce and conversely, e-commerce's failures.
Contents: Early Application Developments for E-commerce; XML; Primary & Early Users of Leading Edge Applications; Development of Products by Businesses and Industries; Leaders and Followers; Applying Technologies to Business Problems and Solutions; Successes and Failures; The Future; Vision
From the Paper "Among the more recent application developments for the web is the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) designed to improve the functionality of the Web by providing more flexible and adaptable information identification. (?The XML FAQ,? Jan 2002). The flexibility and extensibility of XML are very significant features since at present further development of the Web is held back by important constraints due to dependence on a single inflexible document type-HTML (the Hypertext Mark-up Language most frequently used on the web) which is already stretched to the limit with over-use and has severe limitations for data transfer and storage."
