One of the predictions made about XML when it first appeared was that it would bring structured data to ecommerce. XML would allow online retailers to specify features of a product with meaningful tags, improving presentation and search, and enabling all kinds of benefits in the supply chain.
This didn't happen. In retrospect, the XML solution for ecommerce was more like an illustration of XML's capabilities than a ready-to-go application of the technology. The reason is that a widely supported XML schema can't spontaneously emerge. Someone has to create it. Everybody else has to support it.
A decade has passed. Now, in the summer of 2013, the W3C will consider a new standard named Customer Experience Digital Data Acquisition. A clunky name, but the standard has been produced collaboratively by people like Google, Adobe, IBM, and Best Buy, so it has credibility. (One site covering this story used the memorable headline “Tech bigwigs unite for ecommerce data standard”.)
This is clearly a standard driven by business efficiency, not technology. It will be implemented in JavaScript, which may not be the whizziest web technology, but is the most widely used. I don’t know if it’s been produced as XML or if it’s just a set of definitions.
Maybe this is the moral of the story: Technology allows us to dream, but it's the sleepless nights and the nightmares that drive us to action. Perhaps you have to experience the pain of inefficiency before you realize that standards are a necessity.
But that's too pessimistic. I see great advances in standards in so many domains today. The message has penetrated. People get it. The emergence of this ecommerce standard is simply a sign that this form of business is mature and ready for the next stage of its evolution. E-Commerce
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