Microsoft, IBM, Novell, Oracle, the Sun-Netscape alliance and others will next Monday announce a standards initiative aimed at easing electronic commerce.
The initiative will use Extensible Markup Language (XML) and directory services, according to a press release. Like HTML, XML is a language used for creating Web documents. However, with XML you can create custom tags and meta data, which is information about the content in the document.
Also participating in the announcement is Bow Street Software, an Internet start-up firm that offers XML-based software for e-commerce.
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