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Humanity is continually trying to push the frontiers of what it considers its sphere of
influence. Initially, this was manifested in the exploration of physical space—sailing the
oceans, domesticating animals for transportation, learning to fly, building rockets to leap
into outer space. And while we continue our exploration of physical space, we’ve started
exploring more than just the physical world. Over the past few decades, we have started
creating our own world, now affectionately called
cyberspace
. In exploring it, we have
begun the most interesting journey yet: the exploration of our own inherent potential. The
frontier, as a concept, has moved beyond physical exploration to the discovery of our
minds.
As a civilization grows, it learns the benefits of cooperation. It learns the simple rule that
many minds, working together, are better than one working in isolation. It also finds that
the way to engender cooperation is to use communication as a tool. The Internet is
perhaps the greatest example of the realization of this philosophy.
The potential of the Web has been harped upon by the best minds. To us, the best part of
the Web is that we can order a pizza without having to dial the phone. However, we do
concede that the Web is good for more than just ordering pizza. People far more qualified
than us have been predicting for the longest time that the Web will be used for
everything, including playing games, socializing, performing banking transactions, paying
utility bills, buying anything from anywhere, or getting medical consultations. Virtually
every facet of life is predicted to be associated with the Web in some form or fashion.
You could make a very strong argument that technologically, we've reached the point
where we can enable such ideas. For almost every example we’ve enumerated, at least
one or more Web sites currently provide such services. However, the reality is that while
you can do a lot of this, you can’t do all of it in an integrated fashion. There is no
connectivity between these small islands of technology.
Figures 2.1 and 2.2 summarize the general problem for which XML is expected to provide
a solution.
